


A fearful hope was all the world

by miabicicletta



Series: The End of the World AU [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Dystopia, End of the World, F/M, not quite end of the world, okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-02-19 11:24:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 40,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2386568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miabicicletta/pseuds/miabicicletta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Well, Molly Hooper. I believe it is you and me against the world.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Memories

**Author's Note:**

> "End of the world" is really the wrong tag, but the present condition of Things felt too unorganized for "dystopia," yet "blackhearted futurism precipitated by utter socio-political and economic collapse" ran a touch too long, so we'll leave it at _things are a bit not good_ , eh? 
> 
> My deep and endless thanks to [Amalia Kensington (amaliak01)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington/works?fandom_id=133185) for her encouragement and corrections. Best beta ever, you guys. A good friend nods and smiles at your terrible end of the world OTP fanfic idea. A great friend nods and smiles and gchats you desperately tragic headcanons for your terrible end of the world OTP fanfic idea that break your heart in a thousand pieces and leave you on the verge of tears just prior to a staff meeting.

* * *

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”

― Haruki Murakami, _Kafka on the Shore_

* * *

 

**2016, Winter**

Sirens and screams carry through the burning night. Wind and smoke and dust strike her face, sticking to the blood at her hairline and the wet tracks of her tears. She holds a hand up to shield her eyes. The air is cold and hot at once, and as Molly Hooper watches, the only helicopter left in London descends to the tarmac at Battersea Heliport. It is the last way out.

“Mycroft!” Sherlock cries in frustration. “You said four!”

The wind from the rotor blades slow a hair. Mycroft Holmes wears a wrinkled suit, his umbrella nowhere in sight. He is disheveled. Rushed. Fearful. A coffee stain blooms on his left lapel. She can’t stop staring at it. Somehow, more than the rubble of Westminster, more than the shattered dome of St. Paul’s and the fires licking across the city, it is the incongruous sight of that small coffee stain that cements Molly’s terrible understanding of what is happening. The world as she knows it has irrevocably changed.

“Two is the best I can do,” Mycroft shouts over the rotors. “There are limits to my influence, especially now.” He shakes his head. “I am sorry,” he says. And for once in her life, Molly does not doubt he means it. “But you can only take one.”

“John,” Mary Watson says, turning to her husband. “John, go. Go. Take her, please.”

“The hell with that,” John argues. “We’re staying together.”

Molly looks to Sherlock. She sees the resignation in his eyes before he closes them, hangs his head a moment. She knows he’s already made his impossible choice. A resonant pang of guilt strikes her, clear and true. “It’s okay. I know,” she soothes, touching his arm. “You promised them,” she says. It doesn’t matter how far he came to find her tonight, that he saved her life during the horrible mele in Moorgate after the Tube flooded and the BBC stopped broadcasting. He has a promise to honor, and it is not to her. Still. End of the world and all. Time she faced up to a few things.

She kisses his cheek, then the other. “I love you, you know. Always have.” She grips the lapels of his coat, pleading. “Please, _please_ be safe.”

For a long moment he stares at her, unblinking. She doesn’t know if he’s heard her. Doesn’t know if he even sees her standing here, pouring her heart’s last bit of truth out even as hope drained away. “Molly Hooper,” he says finally.

Some great incendiary goes up over Embankment, casting a fiery glow across his features. He looks old and fierce, eyes shining with determination. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She starts. “What?”

Sherlock calls back over his shoulder. “Time to go, Mycroft.” His eyes never move from Molly’s, his voice meant for her only. “I’ve left you before. Won’t be doing that again.”

Behind them, John begs to his wife. “You have a chance,” he barks, trying to push one-year-old Isabelle into Mary’s arms. “For me, if you love me–”

“John, I swear to God, if you try to manipulate me into saving my own skin–”

“Mary, for once in your life _just listen to me_ –”

“Oh God, _enough_.” Sherlock rolls his eyes. “You’re both going.”

Three heads whip around. “What?”

Only Molly is not shocked by the announcement. She’s still stuck on the previous one.

“Sherlock–” Mary breathes, unable to find words.

“That helicopter will get you out of London, out of England. Somewhere safe. Room enough for two adults and a small child.” He touches his friend's arm. “I made a promise. One I intend to honor,” he says to John.

Mycroft protests, looking at him askance. His expression is one of utter disbelief. “Sherlock, you cannot do this.”

“Mycroft,” Sherlock says with utter calm. “I can. I have.”

“Mate,” John pleads.

“It’s all right, John. Really. It is. After all, I won’t be alone.” He looks to her, and somehow it is the most incredible turn of events in these last incredible, nightmare days. “Molly will keep me out of trouble.”

She finds small words. “When have I ever managed that?”

His mouth ticks up the smallest of grins. “Point. She’ll keeping trying, at any rate.”

John swallows thickly. “What will you do?”

Sherlock shrugs, considering. “Get out of London. Find somewhere far enough outside all this. We might be safe at my parents, for a time.” The corner of his mouth raises a tick. “Always figured I’d retire to the countryside someday.”

“You perfect idiot. You reckless, insane, just– _ridiculous_ fool,” Mary cries. Tears stream down her face in the smoke-blasted air.

“We’ll come back. Somehow. We’ll find you. I swear it.” John’s voice breaks. “Take care of him, Molly.”

She kisses his cheek. Isabelle’s. Her tears mingle with Mary’s. “I will. Always.”

“You be good,” John commands. It comes out weakly. His face is that of a man fully aware that this might be the last time he sets eyes on his best friend. His voice is hoarse, aching, and Molly aches for him. She aches for John and Mary for knowing they have no choice but to go, and she aches for Sherlock for knowing he cannot. She’s scrubbed raw from grief, hollowed by fear and uncertainty. John points a finger at them. His jaw ticks. His mouth twitches. “You be good to each other,” he says in a stricken rush.

“We will.”

Mycroft is shocked. He opens his mouth to argue, but Sherlock turns his chin, holds his head high. They hold one another’s gaze for long seconds before Mycroft nods his assent. He knows the depth of his precious little brother’s stubbornness. They grip one another's shoulder, the pain and love and fear a shining mirror in each of their faces. “I will find you. As soon as I am able,” Mycroft says to the pair of them.

Sherlock nods. “You know where to begin.”

They stutter back away from the cloud of sand and debris kicked up, shielding their faces. Her hair tangles in the dirt and rushing air. She feels Sherlock reach for her, threading his fingers through hers, not quite the comfort it should be, and still, somehow, enough. The rotors rises above the tarmac, vanishing into the bright-dark night. They watch the point in the night sky where the helicopter vanishes until long after it has gone out of sight.

“Well, Molly Hooper.”

Beyond the empty, broken frame of Parliament, black smoke rises in thick plumes. A hole in the night stands over the ruin of St. Paul’s; the Shard broken, now many. A siren blares. The ground shakes. Car horns scream. An orange-pink glow hangs on the horizon in every direction.

Sherlock squeezes her hand. “I believe it is you and me against the world.”

Above a river of flames, they watch as London burns.

 

* * *

 

_Thirteen years later_

**2029, Autumn**  


 

“Sir!”

A voice barrels down the hall.

“Can’t believe it. You said it, though. You always did. _You said it_ , and hell! True enough you was right.”

“Sorry?”

“Plain as day, it was. Just waiting. Just like you told us.”

“Major, _what_ exactly did I say?”

“That we wouldn’t know what we was lookin’ for till it stared us dead in the face,” the Major says breathlessly. He thrusts out the folder in his hands. The thin reuse paper crinkles as he thumbs the pages, scanning image after image. “What am I looking at, exactly?”

“Here, sir. Sec. F8, sir. Bottom third.”

He stops in his place, staring at a property along the edge of a wide field and salt pond, connecting through shallow marshes to coastal tributaries. Southeast Scotland, the image caption reveals. Further north than they’d ever looked. Further north than they’d ever tried, even after the first satellite images they’d gotten made it clear that their starting point had long since been leveled, surrounded by mile after mile of the empty, water-logged tidal flat that had become nearly the whole of East England. Concrete and steel and ash, slowly reclaimed more each year by a steadily rising sea.

Everywhere since they’d come up empty. Until now.

John H. Watson draws a sharp breath.

“Jesus Christ.” His hands shake, nearly dropping the file, the papers, the precious message, hidden in plain sight. 

On the edge of a field, a small house sits at the end of a long dirt track. A stone wall lines a green plotted space that might be garden. A shed; a stream; a grove of trees. The barn is an upright structure at the edge of the trees, not far off from the house.

“You loon. You brilliant, bloody loon.”

Upon the roof, written in large, pink letters stood a single phrase: _221B_.

“Gotcha.”

 

* * *

 

Molly Hooper is dreaming.

In her dream, her father takes her hand in his. They watch as a ferris wheel turns against a pink and white sky, the spinning edges of its great mechanical frame awash in bright and colorful lights. Music drifts on the warm wind—the tunes of a boardwalk busker strolling along the pier. The sound of his voice carries on the hot salt air. In her dream, Molly Hooper knows it is the end of a day at the beach, and experiences it with an unremarkable sense of pleasure. Another childhood outing, wholly simple, forgettable, even, in it’s splendor. Her sunkissed skin is slightly burned after an afternoon in the sun. A spray of freckles dot her nose. She is weary and happy from hours spent splashing in the surf and sand. Her hair catches in the whippy breeze. Ice cream melts off her cone. She licks at it idly, tasting the ripened joy of her holiday lark with the careless pleasure of a child who is accustomed to delight. To holidays. To ice cream. Another day, another summer, another treat. She exists only in the present, unable to know how much she will come to regret the things she took for granted throughout her life. How much she was able to expect from the world, once.

In dreams, though, Molly Hooper has no worries. She has no fears. She knows no sickness, harbors no secrets, suffers no grief. Her father looks down at her, his face warmed by the light of a long-extinguished golden hour. He squeezes her hand, and Molly smiles. She only loves and is loved inside a perfect, shining moment that feels like it could stretch out forever.

She blinks.

Gray dawn trickles through pale curtains. The humid press of that long-ago summer gives way to the lumpen weight of blankets failing, in places, to keep out a chill all too quick to find the shortest path to bare feet and exposed skin. Pulling on the socks she’s discarded in the night, she frowns at the bolt of cold air slipping under the bedclothes, thinking of her garden. She slides her hand across the worn sheets beside her. Still warm. She rises to her feet, dons a tatty tartan housecoat and shivers down creaky wooden stairs to the kitchen.

The dream leaves her with an odd sense of guilt: a clingy, claustrophobic feeling that lingers in the corners of her mind. Irrational—she knows this and does not need the dismissive voice of one of her more familiar lesser angels to remind her of how pointless an emotion it is. But the feeling won’t be deterred. It’s sharp thing. An old, malignant remorse that has grown with the years. A longing for a hundred things gone: Carnivals. Ice cream. Holidays. Childhood. Small joys she won’t experience again. Pleasures she cannot share.

Maxwell arches his back and scratches a paw at the door, she lets him out and he streaks across the field to chase birds through the orchard and dank salt marsh. Yawning, she stretches while waiting for hot water to boil. She tries not to dwell on how much longer it takes each week to heat a six-cup-worth kettle. They’ve enough problems without the solar panels failing again. She turns the radio to BBC Scotland, not in the mood for the grim foreign reports Al Jazeera will dispel, nor the flowery propaganda spewing from Radio UN. Or would, if either of them were coming in today. The program is a rerun about epidemic awareness. A deadly dull announcer drones through a list of visible symptoms of radiation poisoning, warns about modes of contracting birdflu, and cites the months old rumors of Ebola in Spain. If the broadcasting outfit were closer she could write up a similar program. Something useful. How to splint a broken arm, maybe. How to clean a wound. Spot signs of infection.

The kettle’s wail shatters the quiet. Slow moving footsteps creak on the floorboards above. Molly worries her knuckles against her hip. Cold mornings invoke phantom aches and pains, the echoes of old injuries and pelvic fractures that never quite healed. Wincing, she reaches for a mug on the highest shelf, finding it just out of reach.

“Morning,” comes a low voice with sleep caught on its edges. Her son’s long limbs make short work of the distance. “Should get you a stepladder in here.”

“I dunno, I think having you around works out just fine,” she answers. “Tea or coffee?”

Mike gives her a terribly preteen look of revulsion. “Tea, please. Do _not_ call that instant brown dreck _coffee_. Don’t deserve the honor.” At twelve, he is old enough to remember the early years when things like coffee beans still made it to their corner of the shrinking world.

She tosses him a teasing smirk of faux apology. “Beg your pardon. Didn't mean to offend your sensitive palate.”

He glances out the window. “Water is freezing again. Want me to check the gennie?”

She pauses. _Shit._ “Nah, don’t worry,” Molly recovers. She offers a bright smile, shrugging. He gives her a blank look, not buying the charade a bit, but doesn’t push it. He worries too much; it worries her. He is far, far too young, and only too ready to take on burdens that should never have been his. Should never have been anyone’s. 

“Just a bit of frayed wiring, I’ll bet. Better let Sherlock take a look at it,” Molly says. Too often she despairs over how keen her son is to grow up. He brushes a lock of black hair out of his face rolling his eyes, and never looks more like his father than when he does. Trouble is, she loves him all the more for it, too.

“I think the idea is to get it working again _today_ ,” he grouses. “Not pull it apart to go through another excruciating engineering module. ”

She slathers jam on a bit of crumbly bread and slides a plate in front of him. “He likes giving you a bit of practical experience.”

“Oh, I _know_ how he does. Chickens?” Mike asks, stuffing his mouth full.

She reaches for the tin of feed. “I’ll do it. It’s bitey. Get your brother and the girls some breakfast, eh?” She wants to check the garden. The cold snap won’t have been good for the vegetables.

He shoves the last of his bread in his mouth, takes the battered tin of feed from her and shrugs into an old coat. “You cook better’n I do. Stay warm,” he says around his mouth of breakfast. Molly wraps a scarf around his neck. Her fingers linger on the drab green threads, snagged here, torn there. It’s a rag. It’s nothing like the £90 cashmere bits of kit his father used to forget around London, chasing after criminals for the thrill of it.

A thread comes loose in her hand.

Nothing is like it used to be.

Cold gusts in as Mike slips out the back door. She tracks him across the garden, watching him push the fringe out of his eyes again. He’ll need a haircut. They all could stand one, really. A day at the salon she’ll call it, and warm some water from the well. The last quarter-bottle of pink nailpolish she owns is in a jewelry box below her bed. The girls will go out of their minds. It’ll help keep their ( _her_ ) mind off the cold, and the unsettling start to the day.

From the opposite end of the house, front door shoves open. Sherlock slips in, tosses his coat and scarf across a chair with all the dramatic flair he once did in her labs, her living room, his Baker Street flat. She smiles.

He swipes a dab of jam with his thumb and leans against the counter at her side. She presses her forehead into the cool, scented fabric of his flannel shirt.

“You’ve been smoking,” she observes, quirking an eyebrow.

“A pipe last night. Hardly three-packs-a-day.”

She hates to admit it, but she loves the smell of tobacco on him. The memories it evokes are powerful. Treasures. She holds them close.

“No news this morning,” she observes, tipping her chin at the radio.

“No,” he answers voice low. He glances at the living room and stairs to make sure they are unheard. “But I caught Lachlan Teague heading in to the co-op. More girls missing from St. Andrews. Said the ISPA has been moving units north. And a boat ran aground last night, too.”

“Where from?”

His jaw ticks. “South.” He does not elaborate, so England. What’s left of it. She presses her cheek to his shoulder again.

“The girls. That’s a dozen now. Are you going to help?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “Too far. Take too much time.”

She pulls back, eyes searching. Ready to give him this freedom to chase a mystery if he needs it. He’s already given up so much. “We’ll be fine for a few days.”

“Probably, but the margin of error is more than I’m willing to risk.”

“So cynical,” she teases, corner of her mouth rising. “The world won’t end.”

“Ever the optimist, Molly Hooper,” he says, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Someone has to be,” she replies.

He presses his forehead to hers. What she wouldn’t do to stay in this moment, forever, barricade it off against the closing dark.

“Easier to manage when a consulting detective is on the case,” she hums.

Sherlock runs a hand down the length of her hair. “Pity they don’t exist anymore.”

“Sure they do.” She kisses the corner of his mouth. “I believe in Sherlock Holmes.”

He holds her to him, resting his cheek on her head. Outside, Mike scatters feed to the chickens, riling them up out of the coop so he can collect eggs in a plastic bowl. If he had been born in another time, his mornings would be spent taking the Tube to one of London’s best schools. Afternoons he'd be doing homework in her office at Barts or play music in the living room at Baker Street. He would never have to worry about power or cold or chickens. None of them would.

Sherlock’s hold tightens, knowing the train of her thoughts. “He may take a case again someday, but for now I’ve more important considerations.”

A herd of footsteps descend the rattling stairs.

“Such as why I am the only one dressed and ready to run cultures,” he announces loudly.

“Christ! It’s freezing!” Jonathan grumbles. He pads to the table with Lily on his back.

“Newton jumped on my _face_ ,” Lily announces irritably, letting go of her brother’s neck as she plonks down on the sturdy table top.

“One of the dangers of letting a semi-feral cat sleep in your bedroom,” Sherlock points out.

“Feral. _Please_.” Jonathan snatches two bowls from the cupboard, fills each with oatmeal for his little sisters. Molly watches as he adds hot water from the kettle and a dash of honey and jam to each bowl. The gesture twists her heart. Small kindnesses may well be the only ones left.

“Silly Lily’s fat furball couldn’t fend for himself if his life depended on it,” he teases. _Thank you_ , she mouths to him as he sets the bowls down for the girls. He shrugs, bashful, and she kisses his shoulder quickly as he fixes himself something to eat.

Sherlock moves closer, dutifully inspecting Lily’s hair with that inquiring eye. “Perhaps Newton saw a mouse in your hair.”

“There’s no mice in my hair!" she cries, indignant.

Molly has a sudden memory of her own fat cat, long ago left behind in London. She dares not wonder what became of him.

“Mmm. Wait, stay very still. I believe I’ve spotted one.” Sherlock’s long fingers skirt around Lily’s shoulders, tickling the skin around her collarbone. She giggles, deep belly laughs, and twists away from Sherlock’s teasing. Molly snorts indelicately, shaking her head.

Lily’s more reserved reflection watches, yawning. She presses against her father’s long legs. He scoops her up and carries her across the kitchen to Molly. He stirs a cup of not-coffee with one hand.

“Good morning, my quiet Violet,” Molly says, running her fingers through her daughter's hair.

“Morning. Mintea?” Violet slurs sleepily, her head on Sherlock’s shoulder. She coughs. Molly grimaces at the harsh rattling sound that worries her more with every month it persists.

Molly kisses her forehead. “Yes, we still have some mint tea.”

Jonathan and Lily bicker about the cat. Mike rushes in, slamming the door. Bits of chicken feed caught in his scarf and coat scatter to the floor. Sir Isaac stalks between the table legs and nips at the errant bits of breakfast. As she pours her children tea, Molly catches a glimpse of herself in the window. The ghost of a smile plays at her mouth. A presence that seems real enough in the flesh, if not exactly living.


	2. Omens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cold. Murder. Strangers. If she believed in them, she’d consider it a day of ill omens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge hugs and gratitude to the amazing **[Amalia Kensington (amaliak)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington/works?fandom_id=133185)** , who took time and energy to look this over even though she's ON AN ADVENTURE. Best.

* * *

“The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense? ”

― David Mitchell, _Black Swan Green  
_

* * *

 

The well remains uncontaminated. A minor victory at best. Sherlock has Jonathan run several samples, taking care to point out the hardiness of microscopic biota, and offers legitimate praise at the sketches of the tiny cellular organisms his youngest son has rendered, as he does so many things. He really is impressed, especially given the quality of the lens, which is far from what was once available at Barts. Still, it suffices. Standards have been forced to adjust.

At his side, Lily hums a tune as she records their findings in their ‘lab notebook.’ The melody is unfamiliar. “Nobody knows you the way I do,” she sings. “Nobody saves you the way I do.”

“Whazzat?” Sherlock asks her idly. Removing the lab goggles (courtesy of a neglected university storage room, as with the microscope), he peers over her shoulder making sure her data is sufficient.

“Hmm?” she says, not looking up.

“What are you singing?” he clarifies.

“One Direction,” she says cheerfully, looking up. She’s drawn little flowers along the margins. Leaves and clouds and a catty-thing that he supposes must be Newton.

He drops his head back. “God. The things that survive,” he laments to the ceiling.

“Mummy likes it,” Violet says, leaning her head on her arm, watching the floor. She pokes at Maxwell’s ear with her toe. Maxwell is unperturbed; mounting evidence suggests a more apathetic German shepherd there has never been.

“Mmm. Art really isn’t her area,” Sherlock replies. His mouth quirks up. He leans down to add an impressive mustache on the drawing of Newton. Lily squawks in protest and tries to grab the pencil from him.

“According to you, neither is conversation, dating, cooking, self-defense or gardening,” Molly calls through the doorway. She pokes her head in from the adjoining room. “I’ve a list somewhere.”

“Yet while she possesses none of those skills or attributes inherently,” he breezes, holding Lily’s arms to her side before throwing her over his shoulder, “she is, as it happens, naturally adaptable.”

“Out of morbid curiosity, what exactly _do_ you consider my area?”

“Oh, this and that. Autopsies, chemical analysis, care and maintenance of small humans and overweight felines–” he over enunciates. Jon snorts. Lily protests something about Newton and mustaches, gripping at his neck and face. He peels her hands away and somersaults her around into his arms.

Molly attempts to scowl at him, but only half-stifles her amusement. “Five minutes,” she instructs. Sherlock drops Lily on her feet and she bolts off into the house. He sprawls at the table next to Violet, mirroring her stance. He lazily tucks a lock of brown hair under her nose. “It’s a good look for you, too,” he teases. She gives him a tiny smile and holds the hair in place, scrunching her nose and lips up so it is pinned between them.

“Shoes. Coat,” Molly reminds. Violet scampers off to find her ill-fitting coat, as do the other small humans who have taken up room in his house, his life, his mind. Molly watches her go before asking in a low voice, “All clear?” She looks pointedly at the water samples.

“For now,” he answers, all joking aside. He lays flat on his back on the workbench before his make-do lab table.

“Okay,” Molly says, a fatalism in her tone that he dislikes. It turns his attention back to the problem at hand, details of which he's been turning over all morning. Sherlock steeples his hands below his chin. Molly gives him a questioning look. “What are you working out?” she asks, recognizing the pose.

 _Trucks_ , he’d said. _Convoy. Tactical. Retreat_. “Something’s...happening.”

“How so?”

 _Fuel. Scarcity. North.._. “Something about what Lachlan said. Don’t have the facts. Not enough information. Need news. Need more,” he ends his rapid fire stream of thoughts in a growl. He sits up fast, leg tapping in irritation.

“Okay.”

“At the clinic ask around. Find out what you can about last night. Boat. Trucks...something.”

She folds her arms across her chest. “Is this about the missing girls?”

His fingers tap a furious staccato, his foot shakes in time. “No. Yes? _No_ ,” he decides.

Seeing her pale, grim face. “Sorry. Frustrated,” he finishes. He huffs and lamely leans back against the table. Molly runs her hand through his hair.

“I’ll find out what I can.” She gives a quick smile before turning away quickly as if by doing so she’ll be able to hide the deep furrow in her brow, the firm line of her mouth.

 

* * *

 

“Teeth?” she says, baring hers. The girls imitate, showing rows of shiny baby whites. Satisfied, Molly nods. She worries about their teeth. Sanjay is a good internist and had done a lot for people, but there’s not a dentist between here and Glasgow.

“I’ll take the box,” Jon says, taking the well-worn green ISPA box from her hands.

She throws a wry glance in his direction. “You know, I _am_ actually able to manage one measly bin,” she teases. “The bounties of the Independent Scottish Provisional Authority haven't quite worn me into old age yet," 

“Course not,” he says, green eyes flashing. “You’re, what? Twenty-nine?”

“Exactly right,” she replies, mussing his dark brown curls. “Always knew I loved you the most.”

“Well, obviously. Be hard not to,” he scoffs. "Everyone knows I'm delightful." 

“Mmm, true,” Molly hums. Then shrugs as if reconsidering, shakes her hand. “Well, _ish_. You’re in the top three of my favorite children, anyway."

“With who?” Lily asks, scandalized.

“I’ll never tell,” Molly swears. Mike, ever determined about it, rolls his eyes. “Can we go, please?” He helps his brother strap the ISPA box on the back of Jon’s mangled bicycle rack, tying it to the frame with a frayed bungee cord. “I’ll drop it outside on my way in,” he calls. She waves the pair of them off down the path. He and Mike speed out of sight as she begins to quiz Violet and Lily about this week’s unit.

The walk warms them, though even as watery sunlight trickles through the flat clouds, the air remains disconcertingly brisk. Lily chatters along, repeating a set of phrases in Russian, Arabic, Mandarin. Violet stares off into the fallow fields, the gray horizon. When prompted, she repeats her multiplication table, but is more than once interrupted by her persistent cough. Molly holds tightly to her when a vicious fit comes on, stopping them in their tracks. She pats her youngest child’s back, smooths her silky soft hair, offering gentle shushes and soothing words. Soft comforts are a poor substitute for broad-spectrum antibiotics, she knows, but they’re all she has left in her kit. Violet coughs and coughs and coughs.

Lily grips her sister’s hand. At the sight, Molly recalls her dream. A fresh tide of guilt washes over her. How they’ll get through another winter like the last one…She blinks rapidly, swallows the white-blind fear. The panic that won’t ever abate. The wind stirs, dropping dead leaves to the ground. Earlier every year. The violent shuddering slows. She feels the rise and fall of Violet’s small chest as she struggles to inhale deep, shaking breaths.

“Okay?” Molly asks, when her breathing calms once more.

“Okay,” Violet manages, her voice harsh and scratchy. “C’mon, gonna be late.”

Leila Hamzani waves from the door of the school. “ _Ahlan wa sahlan_ , Lily Hooper. _Ahlan wa sahlan_ , Violet Hooper,” Leila says. Molly waves back. “ _As salam alaykom_ ,” she hears the girls faintly chatter. They want for much but their scrap of civilization has turned up an odd cultural mix. A minor blessing.

Two streets later, she spies the green bin resting against the clinic steps. Beside it is hunched figure in a brown wool cap. The familiar face of their fearless law enforcement officer greets her. With none of his usual cheer.

“Heyo, Doc,” says Dan Mackay. The older man, usually so animated, and always with a kind word after the children, looks pinched and worn. His mouth sets in a grim line. “Jono dropped this off. Keeping warm?”

“Hi Dan,” Molly nods. “Much as I can. More than I’d like,” she says.

“Aye. Early for it, especially after the heat o’ this summer,” he tuts. “Worst of the worst.”

Dark words coming from him. She glances at him sidewise. “You all right?”

He looks down. “Hard week. Boat ran aground off the coast yesterday. Had some bad luck with the fellas retrieving bodies.”

She folds her arms across her chest, rubbing them against the chill. “Lachlan mentioned on his way in. You should have called,” she tells him, voice soft with reproach. She reaches out and squeezes his shoulder.

He shakes his head. “No need, I’m afraid.”

“Still, I could have helped.”

“Tsch,” he scoffs. “You’ve your hands full as is.” He gives a small, slow sigh. “Which brings me to my next bit o’news.” He looks up over his bushy brows, chewing on his words. “No good way to say it. Wasn’t a good one before, either. Still. Worse now, somehow.” He nods slowly before meeting her eye. “Jackie MacDonald came by bright and early. He and another fella got into the usual knock-down down the pub last night. Too many rounds of your good husband’s own good hooch. Hoping to get his scrapes patched up, he says.”

“He–” Dan shoves his fists in his pockets, tips his chin aside before looking her in face, his light blue eyes pained. “He found a body. Sanjay’s dead, Moll. We think murder, judging by the look of it.”

“What?” Shock hits her like a blow to the chest, stealing the air from her lungs. _No._ _Oh, no, no_. She wants to cry. _Oh, God. Sanjay_. Dan looks away, schooling his own emotions. "I'm so sorry," he says quietly. 

Molly stares at the ground a moment while tears blur her vision. She bites her cheek. She taps her foot to keep the emotion from overwhelming her. God, it can't be. It had been such a rare stroke of luck, finding him. Even rarer, the friend he'd become. Over five years, Sanjay Patel had helped her care for the farms and villages on this scrap of forgotten land. Helped her see them through injuries and illnesses. God, he’d patched Sherlock up a dozen times, at least. Taught her children. He’d tried so hard to save—

She wipes at furious tears. "When did you see him last?"

"Two days ago. I did house calls yesterday. Stopped by in the morning. It was empty then. Usually beat him in." She closes her eyes, jaw clenched, until she can look up again. “How did it happen? And when?” she asks, voice thick.

Dan Mackay looks over his shoulder to the clinic. “Must have been last night. Magpies, we thought. Looting for drugs. Heard from the Provisional Authority fella brings in the petrol and such that there’s been a lotta trouble down south. Been worse and worse lately. PA is outmanned.”

Hardly news, that. There was always some quality of madness preying somewhere along the twenty-foot-high, barbed-metal ribbon of force that separated the Scot end of the United Kingdom from else what remained—a burned out country, forever scarred. It was rumored most everything south of Yorkshire had been deadlanded by radiological fallout. Having witnesed what she'd seen, Molly does not doubt it. She bites at her lip. They’d been lucky to get across when they did. So, terribly, terribly lucky.

Her fingernails dig into her forearm. “A doctor’s life for a handful of pills and some junk equipment?” She sucks in her lips, trying not to weep. “What a _fucking_ waste.”

Dan pulls her in for an awkward hug and for half a second it feels so much like the way her dad used to, she’s overwhelmed. He had an adult daughter in Hull, she remembers. A son at university in Manchester. He’d lost touch with them when the data centers went down, one after another after another. A week later half of England was dead. Dan hadn’t heard from either of them since.

He pats her back. “I’m sorry. Truly. But I have to ask you to take a look around. Confirm the body. Get your take. And see what might have gone missing.”

She nods. “Of course.”

“Know it’ll be hard–”

Molly waves him off. “No, that’s...I know what to expect. I used to do this for a living.” A good excuse, and one that has the virtue of being true, too. She was no stranger to death, before or after the fall; had dealt with it every day in her capacity at Barts, as well as in her friendship with Sherlock Holmes. But in the time since…

Images flash in her mind. Epidemic panic. The first terrifying weeks that bled into anxious months of muted acceptance after the shock began to wear off. The nauseating sense of familiarity at each sign that they’d left the best of humanity behind; every burning structure. The weeks-old wreckage of a 747, strewn out across mile after mile. Bodies scourged by chemical poisoning. Others that had known violent deaths of a much different nature.

Her perspective is much closer now. More personal.

“Right. I forget, you and Will. The Met, and such. Just used to you setting broken arms.”

She follows him inside, noting the closed off the door to the clinic with a hand drawn sign: _Clinic temporarily closed._ The outer office and waiting room looks as it should but for a streak of mud across the floor and a broken chair in one corner. Dan makes a note of the disarray in a small notebook; the days of crime scene photography and analysis long since past. The lights are off in the inner office (exam room, dividing curtains, cabinets). All is silent as she steps inside, following the trail of mud, noting the many, heavy footprints.

There is blood pooled on the lino. In it lies the prone and broken body of her colleague. “Oh, Sanj,” Molly croaks.

Her fists clench. She closes her eyes. Bright, hot teardrops squeeze through her lashes, dripping down her cheek. She takes a deep breath, exhales, and wipes her tears away. Now is not the time. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

She manages a cursory visual exam. Bludgeoning to the face and extremities. Gunshot wound, messy with shot. A sickly, organic and sulfurous odor hangs about the room as she walks the periphery. Cruel and vicious details call out: racial slurs and Biblical nonsense are scrawled across one long wall. The drippy black paint would appear childish if it wasn't so hateful. 

 _ISAIAH 34:2 For the indignation of the LORD is upon all nations, and His fury upon all their_ armies, she reads. _He hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter._

 _How did we get here?_   she wonders, remembering a world long since passed. One so much bigger than these thirty-odd gray, rock-strewn square miles between two rivers. Even during those terrible days, the unbelievable time after the connective tissue holding their digital world together began to fall apart, nothing close to this had ever seemed possible. How could so much have happened since that inconspicuous January morning? A weekday, some unimportant Tuesday a few weeks into the new year. Not a holiday; not the anniversary of any great coup, uprising, atrocity; no wars had been recently declared (aside from the usual American sort). It wasn’t the birthday of an exalted leader or the deathday of any known revolutionary. No crusades had been called for, no jihads announced, no retaliations demanded to answer for some grave, calculated injustice. There seemed no rhyme or reason behind the chaos that rippled out across the planet. And every day since.

However much reality asks of reason, rarely was any required.

Rumors spread later. A rogue computer virus engineered beyond control by a DarkNet saboteur in Antwerp. No, no it was the Chinese electronic army who’d crashed everything. A self-aware, Frankenstein of machine learning; hadn’t it started in Mountain View? Digital terrorism perpetrated by Jabhat al-Nusra, funded by the Khorasan Group. A solar flare. The work of God.

Maybe whoever sent the first strikes knew more. Maybe it was an unhappy accident that triggered a cascade of catastrophic and destructive responses. Maybe the Russian or Iranian or Pakistani or American intel was better. Maybe they knew nothing at all, and had only acted out of fear and desperation.

In her heart of hearts, Molly Hooper doesn’t truly care how any of it happened.

She thinks of ferris wheels and fire and Violet's unending cough. 

She doesn't care how it began. But she’d really like to know why it happened.

Something skitters along the floor. A rat has ducked out of a ventilation grate and is scurrying around the floor, sniffing at the hours-old body lying prone. 

“Oh!” Molly exclaims, she reaches out for something and ends up hurling a plastic tray across the room, stomping her feet on the floor. “Get out!” The rat scurries off. A fresh prick of tears wells up in her eyes. Reaching back, her hands search for the firm comfort of the wall. 

Molly Hooper braces herself upright against the disorientation of a world spinning wildly off-axis. She sinks to the floor and lets out a single, tiny sob. There is so much she wants to hate—people and their twisted beliefs in terrible circumstances. She wants to hate the rat most of all. But she finds she can’t.

Rising, she washes her hands, wipes her eyes, and forces herself to calm. Of all the things worth hating, a single, hungry rodent is far from blame.

She lets out a long, steady breath. It just wants to survive.

She steps out into the weak morning light a few minutes later, offering her findings.

“Anything missing?” Dan asks, making notes. “Figured they’d have gone for the lockup. ‘Cept I can’t make out what might’ve been taken.”

“The solar panels,” she says, feeling hollow. “Hardly what they came for, I think. Just an afterthought.” Burglary she could almost, _almost_ understand. This was just senseless.

“I called it in to HQ in Glasgow. ISPA fellow there said they’ve been seeing a lot of this. Bangladeshi couple found out on a beach. Bad end. Week before five young Sikhs and a girl of Moroccan–” Dan cut off, shakes his head. “He’d been here, what? Couple of years?”

“Six,” Molly swallows. “Refugee boat from Yarmouth. Lost his partner a few years before that.”

“Think of anyone who’d have it in for him?” Dan asks. 

Molly raises one eyebrow. She thinks of the hateful graffiti. The answer is obvious, even to her. “A few.”

Dan sighs, shoves his hands in his pockets. “Yeah.”

“I can’t prove it, not without medical or forensic evidence.”

“I know. God, what I’d give for a crime lab,” Dan laments.

“Then what is it you hope–”

“ _I don’t know!_ But it’s _my job_ , Molly,” he exclaims, desperate. He tosses his notebook aside, running his fingers haphazardly through his white hair and wrings his cap in his hands. “It’s my job to try to find something." He exhales hard. “Look, I know. _I know_ this doesn’t feel like anything useful. The system is broken. And, yes, maybe at best we’re just holding a few small pieces and trying by brute force and sheer will to keep them together. I know. But I gotta do something. We've all gotta keep doing something.” He lets out an angry puff, shaking his head. His hard eyes soften as he turns to her. “Else, what _do_ we do? What else do we have?”

Molly touches his elbow, leads him away from the clinic building with its blood-soaked room and body of her friend. _Each other_ , she wants to say, but doesn’t. At the moment, things like love and friendship and family feel more like liabilities than comforts.

 

* * *

 

It takes most of the morning to get the clinic sorted. Dan and a few other volunteers help transport Sanjay’s body while arrangements can be made. At the town’s center is a municipal hall used for indoor community events. It abuts the small daily market, and seems as good a place as any to set up a temporary medical facility. She can only hope there are no emergencies. Her day is occupied by minor maladies and a few of the usual suspects. Alema N’gona stops with a mug of tea and a quick chat. She's just hauled a cache of mussels up from the beach. Alema was at one point a solicitor in Leeds and competed in triathlons around the world for charity. Now she spends her days knee-deep in freezing water and bartering for turnips and eggs.

Molly cleans a fair few wounds; she assesses injuries and aches, keeps a watchful eye out for swift-moving infections. But mostly she just listens. People come to her for hope as much as help. It heartens her, most days. But today behind her ‘Dr. Molly’ smile runs an ever-growing list of concerns, fanatics inclined to murder a new and startling addition. The rumors have been disquieting since they'd first popped up, a year, maybe more or so back. They seemed, like so many bad things, like something that was happening to other people. Something that happened in places where there were no smart, sensible people left. Somewhere different. 

_He hath delivered them to the slaughter._

The gossipmongers haven’t torn into the news yet. She’s grateful for it, really. She feels dazed, and unready to talk about it, much less break it to the children. She isn't at all confident she can handle a flood of tears without contributing a few waves of her own.

Her small stream of patients dries up after two o'clock and Molly takes the opportunity to cart the green box to the market, changing the clinic sign to indicate she’ll be on call for the day, and goes to collect their weeks ration from Jenny Finch, who runs the allotment center. Never exactly generous, the share of flour, oats, salt and other staples is even more meagre than usual.

“Why so little?” she asks.

“Nothing came in last week,” Jenny explains, shaking her head. “I asked the fellows at HQ but got the run around time and time again. Maybe next will be better, eh?”

“Any word on the medicine I’ve been asking for? Antibiotics? Anesthetics? Insulin?”

Jenny shakes her head again. “I’m sorry. Swear you’ll know as soon as I do, Moll. Bright side, they did promise to get a few more supplies to us in the next shipment. Splints and medical gauze and the like. Better than nothing, I suppose.”

“Right,” Molly answers. _A lot of good gauze will do when someone comes down with the flu or goes into diabetic shock._

“Best to Will and the kids, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Molly nods.

Complaints about the delays, the cold, the disturbing rumors from south bounce back and forth outside the school as she stands waiting for the girls. Molly listens, but doesn’t add to the fire. She waves at Jonathan when he rolls past from the upper school. He whistles to Mike. They park their bikes and join her.

“No patients?” Jon asks.

“Slow day,” she replies, smiling tightly. Mike reads something in her face, but doesn’t comment. She sighs, knowing she’ll get the third degree later. Too much his father’s son. She tips her chin at Sybil Lockley, who is trying to calm her squalling toddler while loading bags into the basket of a rattly Peugeot. “Go help her, will you?” He frowns, considering the baby with distaste, but complies. Walking home, they’re all in high spirits, which lifts hers.

“Mum,” Jon asks, walking his bike alongside her as they head back to the farm. The coastal air is salty and cool, skipping over misty dunes and the northeast edge of Tentsmuir Forest. On the back of Jon’s bike balances the ISPA ration box, it’s dull color fading into the closing green of the surrounding trees and brush. “Is it true when you were my age you could go almost anywhere on the planet?” His green eyes search her without guile.

She nods. “Yes. We could.” _And we took it for granted._

“Being in a plane must have been so weird,” he says, shaking his head. “Mad.”

Her eyes lift to the sky, searching for absent contrail lines. She can’t remember the last time she saw one. “You’d be surprised,” she says. “It’s amazing what you get used to.”

“Where did you go?” Violet asks, swinging her hand.

“Lots of place,” Molly replies. “I went to California once with a friend. Australia. All over Europe. I loved Rome.”

Jon whistles his approval.

“What’s Rome?” Lily asks.

“A city in Italy. It existed for thousands of years. Older than London, even.” _It fell too,_ she does not say. “Went on a case with your dad to Texas, once.”

“Is that in America?” Violet pipes up.

“Mmm. Your grandparents had done a lot of traveling there when he was small. We solved a case and afterwards he asked me to dance. The stars at night, were big and bright.” She hums the tune.

“Wish I’d been born then,” Jon says. He looks across the broken asphalt and dying grass beside the roadside, bored.

Molly does not mention the destruction that came down on Washington and New York, just as it had London, Brussels, Berlin, or the fires and drought that burned across the American West, year after year. That there hasn’t been news of anything south of Nova Scotia for years. There is so much uncertainty. She wonders if there are still waves like mountains coming through the mist at Big Sur. If the Sistine Chapel still holds such impossible beauty. She hopes, and the hope, in some ways, is the worst of it—The rumors of Edinburgh starting classes again in a year. An untapped oil field in the North Sea. The W.H.O. still holed up in a lab in Helsinki, where they’ve found a new "cure" for ebola; for birdflu; for cancer. The hope kept you in place, waiting. Like frogs in the pot. Boiling away to nothing.

“What was your favorite?” Jon asks.

She starts out of her fugue, smiles. “I’m not sure.” She twists her mouth, thinking. “California felt so big and bright. Everywhere you looked there were mountains and water and sunshine. My friend Meena and I drove along the coastline and went camping in Big Sur. I could listen to the waves for hours. But, oh, gosh, in Paris and Amsterdam you could feel like you’d walked into another century. And I never knew the desert could be beautiful before I saw Texas. It reminded me of where I’d grown up in the North, sort of. All that space that looked wild and empty until you got up close.”

“If you could go anywhere,” Jon asks, always hungry for what he can’t have. “Anywhere in the world, right now, where would you go?”

 _Anywhere?_ She thinks of blogs and body parts and silly hats and a time when luxuries like justice and rationalism had a place in society. When the murder of a dear friend might have been a shock and a terrible crime, but one there was hope of solving.

“Baker Street,” she says.

 

* * *

 

It’s late afternoon by the time they get back. The girls settle down with their books and the radio in Sherlock's workspace. A French station comes in, weakly, playing old songs and radio dramas. The pair of them will be able to occupy the rest of the afternoon and evening puzzling out new phrases. She’s glad its not the Arabic station they sometimes pick up from Amsterdam. It is probably a more useful language in the long run, but harder for her to correct. One Egyptian Qu’ran in the house does not for useful translation make.

Newton rubs against her legs as she climbs the stairs. He’s a savvy one, she’ll give him that. He knows where his dinner comes from. “Off, you great beastie,” she tells him, nudging him down the stairs. Like long-lost Toby, he sniffs at the lack of attention and yowls before dashing down the steps to beg snuggles and scraps from Sherlock, tinkering away in his lab. She runs a test spray from the shower. The water comes out cold.

Clad in just her faded blue jumper and jeans, she takes the garden path outside the back door, wrapping her arms around her middle. The generator has been getting more and more difficult to keep up. Parts don’t come into the market anymore, not even the Chinese-made bits. The only kind they’ve seen hide or hair of for the past few years. Same with the solars. She removes the aluminum casing and stares at the problematic machinery, not even knowing where to begin. Shredded wires and make-do patches stare back. It’s been years since it operated at peak efficiency. Molly bites her inside cheek.

Over her shoulder, through the half-open outside door to his workshop she hears Sherlock tinkering away at some project. Beyond, their two cows have wandered beside the barn, idly chewing. She fiddles with a lock of hair that’s fallen from her bun. She should check the lock to the barn and the fencing on the chicken coop, make sure they’re both secure. Milk and eggs make up the majority of the protein they get. They can’t afford to lose any source of calories, especially if the PA is becoming unstable. Molly frowns, realizing she had utterly forgotten to ask in town about the ISPA trucks or the boats that had capsized offshore, Sherlock’s vague and shapeless concern supplanted by frightfully concrete ones. Inside, she hears Violet and Lily laughing at something he’s done or said. Molly’s heart lurches. There was so much to fear when you loved so much. 

She sighs, closes the casing. Going without a generator will mean an impossibly long winter, and this with the solar panels already on the fritz. They're already using a minimal amount of electricity as it is, just enough for a few lights, the radio, two cameras, the workshop. She stops to assess the garden, see what the cold weather has done to her squash and kale and crop of late summer vegetables.

Door swinging open, Mike tears out of the back door of the house.

“Someone’s coming up the road,” he says fast.

“What?” Molly Hooper shoots to her feet, plants forgotten. “Who?”

“Cars,” he exclaims, breathless.

She repeats, not sure she’d heard correctly. “ _Cars_?”

“Cars,” he huffs, eyes wide. “I saw it on the security feed in your office. Listen,” he points to the distance, where a sound originates. A sound she has not heard in at least half a decade. A column of dust and birds climbs to a flat sky.

Cold. Murder. Strangers. If she believed in them, she’d consider it a day of ill omens.

“Get your father. Find Jonathan.” He turns on his heel and bolts toward the outside door of the workshop.

Molly rushes into the house. “Girls,” she yells across the living room and its great stone fireplace through the door. They hop through the door, looking at her quizzically. Under the radio she hears Mike whisper forcefully to Sherlock. Across the distance, his eyes flash up and meet hers. She nods. “I need you to put your things aside and take a break in the cellar, alright?”

“Why?”

“Because I need you to,” she answers, clipped.

Violet’s bright eyes follow her. “Mummy?”

“Please listen to me,” she orders, looking through the window. She can hear the sound louder now, and so do they. They glance at once another, unnerved. Molly darts past them through the living room the door to the workshop lab. Sherlock has very quickly begun to lay out his cache of weapons and ammunition.

Outside, Mike shouts for Jonathan. Maxwell starts barking. 

"Sanjay was killed last night," she says to Sherlock.  

"What?" His eyes snap up. 

"Shot to death," she says, remembering the violence of the scene, the vitriol. "I'm not sure this is a coincidence."

His facial expression never wavers, though his jaw ticks. "Maybe. Maybe not." 

Molly considers the guns with the faint distaste she has always felt for them. Undaunted, she reaches for one and loads the cartridges the way she’d learned to years before. Sherlock does the same to the shotgun, a crinkle in his brow that belies his thoughts. Most likely adding this most recent murder to the string of deaths and disappearances up and down the coast over the last few months. Most, from what they had heard, had been nighttime raids by semi-organized gangs. A daylight robbery is far more bold, even in these times.

Mike ducks his head back into the room, huffing a little.

“What did the vehicles look like?” Sherlock asks.

“Gray,” Mike answers. “Big ones, with wheels that were high-up like. Dunno what you call them. They looked clean. New. At least three.”

“Land Rovers?” Molly asks. “I’ve never seen the ISPA use those before,” she wonders aloud.

“They don’t. Don't have the petrol for it. But I’m more interested in the new-factor. Not much new anything, is there?” He steps backward, turning his calculating gaze out the far window to the narrow track leading off their property. He grins at the information, a wholly wicked and delighted grin. “Oh, this _is_ interesting.”

“Sherlock,” she commands, tossing him a look. "Focus _._ "

He looks back to her, nods. "Right.”

Rushing back through the door to the main house, she kneels, shoving aside the throw rug that hides the pull-door to the cellar. “You remember the frequency for the Jane and Declan?” Their closest neighbors would be the quickest to provide help, if it came to it.

Violet’s eyes are wide, but Lily takes her hand and says, “Yeah. Violet wrote it on the back.”

“That was very smart. Good thinking.”

They climb carefully down the cellar steps to the dirt floor. Molly lowers two jugs of water down to them and holds a finger to her lips. “Be very quiet.” They switch on a small flashlight. Their small, elfin faces peer up at her from the darkness.

“How long do we have to stay down here?” Violet asks.

“Wait one hour and if you haven't heard, you call Jane, okay? Very quiet, right?"

“What is that sound?” Violet asks, again, voice higher.

Molly holds a finger to her mouth. “Be very quiet and very brave.” She closes the trapdoor on them, trying to overcome the black pit in her stomach. Six-years-old and fear is her daughters’ closest friend. In the ruins of the gone-away world, love was a train ride through hell where the seats only ever faced backward.

She grits her teeth, steeling herself. “I hate playing survivalist,” she announces to no one in particular.

“Better than the alternative,” Sherlock says, peering through a curtain in one window, then another.

"Sherlock." A possibility has been lingering in the back of her mind. An old hope that had grown dimmer with each passing year. A promise. “Do you think–?” She hesitates, almost afraid to say it. “Is it possible? After all this time?”

Outside, a humvee rolls down the dirt track. It is followed by two more. They pull up just past the far, high stone wall, not twenty yards from the front door.

“I don’t know,” he says slowly.


	3. Questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He had not pictured anything close to this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the thanks and hugs and big squishy cuddles to my dearest [Amalia Kensington (amaliak01)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington/works?fandom_id=133185) for her invaluable, invested, and incomparable time, energy and encouragement. Although sometimes she needs to resort to bribery to get me to finish things (threats do not work), she is always there for me. She's aces.

* * *

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”  


― Margaret Atwood, _The Year of the Flood_

* * *

  

Jonathan Hooper watches the approaching vehicles and grips the gun tighter in his hands. They’re big, weird shaped-like. Wider than he’s seen. The Authority uses trucks, but not like these. He doesn’t remember them ever being so shiny.

He glances over at Mike but finds his older brother staring hard out the window, seeing everything, like always. Adjusting his posture, he holds his shoulders back, focuses on the visitors before Mike can jump on his iffy form. Upstairs he can hear Mum's footsteps as she takes her own position. Several guys with big ( _shit_ they were big) guns roll out of the cars. Jon swallows. Hard. A shortish man with steel gray hair climbs out of the lead vehicle, striding toward the house.  

On the far side of the door, they watch as is their father strolls up to the gray-haired man in charge. Jon can see his eyes flicking over the man, drinking in the details. The silence is big and awful, sounding in his ears like seashell so that a dull roar seems to fill the air.

“Pakistan or Morocco?” he hears his father say through the glass.

Mike catches his eye from the other side of the the doorframe, a worried expression crossing his face. “Oh, fuck,” Mike groans.

“Dad, _no_ ,” Jon whispers, eyes going wide at his recklessness in the face these men with their cars and their guns.

“Sorry?” the man replies.

“Bit thin on information here. Radio is sketchy on the best of days, typically half in Mandarin or Arabic. I like to think I keep up, though. So: Your uniform; threadbare, worn liberally over the last few years. Even now, hard to imagine office work creating that much wear, so you’ve been deployed. Abroad. Reports from Radio Free Europe and what’s left of a foreign news service indicate major military action between Kashmir and Lahore and devastation across West and North Africa. You’ve a limp, though, no, actually, you don’t. Psychosomatic, ongoing. Get over it, will you? It’s recurrence is an interesting thing, though. Suggests you’ve been in action recently, even though you’re a doctor and have medical training. Army doctor, _obviously_. You’ve a family still; your wife and daughter. Unlike most people you didn’t lose them after the fall. You’re a lucky man. The luckiest: a family man. Which is why you’re working; hard coming by a decent job at the end of the world, one assumes. And my question still stands: Pakistan or Morocco?”

Gray hair cracks a grin. “Not bad.”

“Did I get it right?”

“Eh, mostly. Never had trouble with work. Got some connections. Family bit was almost there. Wife, daughter. Cheating, by the way. Gotta son, too.”

“Always something,” their father says.

And the pair of them burst out laughing.

Mike’s eyebrows crease. _The hell?_ Jonathan mouths.

“Jesus,” the man breathes and pulls his father into a tight hug. “Sherlock.”

“They know each other?” Mike says, puzzled as he sets his gun down by the sill. He shoves the door open to stalk outside. Jon shrugs in response, making sure the safety is on his rifle and setting it besides his brother’s before following him out. From down the three stone steps and into the front garden, the gray haired man looks a bit familiar. By the time he’s made it to the low garden wall, he’s started to look like like–

“Oh,” Mike says, stopping in his tracks as they reach the same conclusion.

“That’s–” Jon says.

“John Watson,” Mike finishes.

Jon stares. “Bloody hell.”

John Watson whistles, indicates to the soldiers at his back. They fan out along the property, keeping watch. They have strange patches on their arms. Symbols he can’t quite make out. “Eyes up, boys,” John Watson says. He presses something on his wrist and says something lowly into it. Was that was a mobile was? Jon had always wondered.

“Oh.” Their visitor straightens as he catches sight of them, surprise written clear on his face. “Oh. _Oh_ my God. These yours?”

“Mmm. Butch and Sundance,” his father says. He and John Watson glance at one another and crack up again.

“Planning to introduce us?” Mike asks, raising an eyebrow.

That earns a cheeky look. “I _think_ I’m allowed a slight lapse in social graces given it has been over a decade since I last saw my best friend,” his father points out.

John Watson feigns incredulity. “Oh, you know what those are now?”

The corners of Jonathan’s mouth turn up. All the stories Mum and Dad told him about John Watson over the years, they never mentioned he was sort of...sassy. His face cracks into a smile. John Watson was _here_. John Hamish Watson in the _actual_ flesh!

“One could argue that being at the arse-end of civilization makes the finer points of civility all the more important,” Sherlock quips. He places hand on Jon’s shoulder and says formally, “This is John Watson. My one-time flatmate and blogger.” He glances down on them. “John, my sons.”

John Watson holds out a hand to each of them. “My god, look at you pair.”

“Mike,” Mike says seriously, holding out his hand.

He doesn’t hesitate to wrap his arms around Mike. Jon represses a smirk as his brother awkwardly relents. “Mike,” John repeats, struck by wonder. “God. You are the spitting image of your father,” John says. His brows raise. “As in Mycroft?”

Sherlock sighs, waves his hand in long-abandoned protest. “Ehh.”

“Thanks, _Sherlock_ ,” Mike huffs.

“Jonathan,” Jon intervenes, grinning at the man whose stories he’s heard since he can remember hearing stories.

“Jonathan, wow.” He pulls him into a hug. “You’re, what? Ten, eleven?”

“Nine,” Jon answers.

John laughs. “Yeah, tall for your age. Course you are.” He beams, shocked and happy. Jon grins back. “Jesus,” John Watson says. “Jesus Christ, I can’t. I’m sorry, I just can’t...” The man looks away, blinking very fast.

His father waves them to the door. “Come in, John. Seems we have some catching up to do.”

 

* * *

 

He hadn’t known what to expect. Not a tick. If Sherlock Holmes was, in fact, still drawing breath on a remote peninsula of eastern Scotland, then surely, after all this time, he’d not be the same man he once was. The one with the well-cut suits and trademark air of affable disdain; though his best friend had once claimed little regard for the world around him, he had been shaped by it. Sherlock had been a resident of that world, a guardian of it, one could even argue; was a product of its imperfect order. How Sherlock had responded to the the loss of that order, that system, how he’d adjusted (and how Molly Hooper had fit in) were questions that plagued John nearly every waking hour of every day since he had watched the man forfeit everything he had for John's family, that last, terrible burning night in London.

He had not pictured anything close to this.

Sherlock leads them through the cottage door to an open living room. Through one door he can see a workbench, half covered in the same sort of detritus as had once littered his kitchen table long ago at Baker Street. The main room, with its exposed timber, stone hearth and dingy rugs, feeds into an open kitchen. Behind a long table of dark wood are a set of hanging pots, a kettle. A deep, country sink is stacked with a set of plates. It is spare, make-do, and strangely domestic.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding?” he muses aloud. “Huh.”

A trapdoor in the floor lies open. Shotgun left outside, Sherlock drops to one knee. “One second.” He leans down and, to John’s astonishment, lifts up a tiny girl in ill-fitting clothes with luminous blue eyes and light brown hair.

“Oh, wow. Hi,” he starts to say, amazed _yet again_. But the words cut out as Sherlock repeats the motion, pulling up a second, identical little girl. Déjà vu hits him like a brick. The girls look up at him, two pairs of matching and uneasy eyes.

“Lily. Violet,” Sherlock explains, gesturing from one to the other. “Twins,” he finishes, amusement flashing in his eye. _Didn’t expect that did you, John?_

“Yeah, I...can see that,” he gapes in utter astonishment. He’s only just wrapped his brain around Sherlock Holmes having any children at all, and they’ve doubled. “Wow. _Wow_. Ladies.” He blinks, shocked.

They looked uncertainly at their father, clearly unaccustomed to strangers. Lily looks up at her father, who tips his head, encouraging. “This is John. My friend.”

“Oh,” says Lily, looking at him. She grins, a crooked, sunny smirk.

“From London?” Violet asks shyly. She bends down and scoops up a tabby cat appearing at her heels, snuggling it against her.

“Yeah. I–I am. I was,” he amends.

“We’ve heard your stories,” Lily hops on her toes, all excitement now that his uncertain identity has been cleared up. John looks at them, at a loss. Four. Four bloody–

“Some of them anyway,” says a voice. Sherlock holds his hand down the ladder once more. Molly Hooper hauls herself up through the floor as Sherlock lowers the door back into place. Faint lines play at her eyes and mouth, but the years have been better to her than they have to most. She smacks dust from her hands before throwing her arms around him.

“Oh, Jesus. _Molly_.” John envelops her in a fierce, desperate embrace. Beneath her frayed jumper he can feel the press of her ribs, the racing beat of her heart.

“John,” she says. Her voice is thick with emotion. She squeezes him hard. “I can’t– _Oh_ ,” she cuts off and hugs him again.

He nods, barking a half-laugh, half-sob, smiling into her shoulder. He squeezes once more, drawing away to look between her and Sherlock, shaking his head. “We didn’t know if....I mean...Christ. Look at you.” His throat pinches, cutting off his words. “Look at you all,” he manages, composing himself. The fluttering sense of relief is familiar. The same cut of joy and peace that had accompanied his best friend’s return from the dead almost two decades ago. It’s a good fit. Not many of those left.

He takes a breath, centering himself. “So.” Teasing in his voice. “You’ve been productive.” He tips his head at the small band of Hooper Holmeses the interim of long years had produced.

“A bit,” she smiles. And in spite of the occasional glimmers of silver in her hair and a long white scar running from her temple down the right side of her cheek, twenty years melts away from Molly Hooper’s face.

“Mummy, it’s _John Watson_ ,” Lily crows, climbing upon on a chair.

Molly wipes her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “You’re something of a legend, even without the blog.”

“Yeah, well. Not exactly the stuff of bedtime stories,” John says, shaking his head.

“Yes, John, because traditional fairy tales have always been so suitable for small children,” Sherlock quips, leaning against the table. Lily scrambles behind him and rests her chin on his shoulder and for a moment John is not sure what is more mesmerizing: the image, or how at ease Sherlock Holmes is within it.

“What do you mean?” Violet asks. Her cat purrs happily in her arms.

The scowly older boy (Sherlock Junior, there) cuts in. “He means that lots of folk stories are meant as cautionary tales, and involving nasty things like murderers and rapists and eating little kids,” he clarifies, causing Molly to jut her jaw out in annoyance.

“Thank you, Mike. Ever tactful,” Sherlock says, droll.

“Thank you, Sherlock. Ever truthful,” Mike- _Mike, right_ -counters. He perches on the arm of a worn sofa, mirroring his father’s inflection perfectly. The similarity is too astounding that John cannot find words to form, only scoffs another incredulous laugh. _Honestly._

“What are you doing here?” Molly says, changing the subject. Her eyes flick to the dozen armed young men waiting outside.

“I had a promise to keep,” John says. “One long over due.”

A weight seems to lift from her. “After, we saw–” She swallows, eyes flicking to the girls, and he can see she's choosing her words carefully. “There was a lot of downed aircraft, after everything that happened. We never actually knew if you even made it out that night.”

“We did. Battle carrier in the North Sea. Two days later we were in Norway. Sort of a refugee camp. It’s grown.” He gestures to the front yard. “Boys are part of a compulsory regiment. Seems you got one of your own here,” he winks at Jon and Violet. “The Baker Street Irregulars.”

“Eh, more like a labor force than an army. Easiest way to come by extra hands,” Sherlock shrugs, affecting disinterest. He folds his arms across his chest. “I get _so_ tired of farming in the afternoon,” he childishly laments.

“The workers party would like to issue their complaints,” Mike says. He tips back and collapses lazily on the cushions.

“Speaking of which—” Sherlock warns, glancing purposefully at the growing shadows outside.

“Not it!” Jonathan jumps quickly, running over him.

“Not it,” Violet and Lily say in unison.

“So much for collective bargaining,” Mike frowns. At John’s questioning look he explains, “Gotta feed the cows.”

Molly glances to Jonathan (Jesus, he realizes, _Jon_ ) the front yard. “Could you and the girls please bring some water to John’s companions outside.” The girls look at her with trepidation (more strangers), but nod their assent. John watches as the four of them scurry off to their appointed tasks.

John rubs a hand against his mouth. “You have children. You have _cows_.”

“Your observational skills are sharp as ever,” Sherlock quips.

“God, where to start?” John says to them. “There are a thousand things I want to ask you. How did you–” he searches for the word, “–manage? How did you get, well, here?” The same dark look crosses each of their faces.

“First things first,” Sherlock says, standing.

“What’s that?”

“We need to hide your transport,” he says dramatically, and disappears through the door.

“What, them? Wait–” John asks. “Sherlock!”

 

* * *

"Luxuries." 

"What?" 

He follows his friend out the door again, trailing a step behind as Sherlock stalks across yellow, trodden grass the way he had once stalked the sidewalks of London, hailing cabs and shooting off observations. “Luxuries, John. Very few of them left: Abundant food, water, security. And fuel. Fuel’s one of the big ones. Solar’s the major workaround; generators, when you can spare them. But petrol’s tricky; hard to get. Limited resources a generation ago, more so now. There’s strict controls; highly regulated. But as difficult as fuel is to come by, it isn't the most desirable bit of your rides here.”

He whistles one of the lieutenants.

“No, what makes them worthwhile are their parts. Commodity trade is somewhat lacking on the far side of a war. Or, you know,” he waves his hand. “Whatever it was. You’ve driven in from what was Leuchars, no doubt. Newport-on-Tay would have been closer, but you’d have wanted to see what remains of the air base. Weapons. Aircraft. Supplies. Anything that might be useful. Unfortunately you’ll have roused up quite a bit of interest en route. The countryside here seems quiet, empty, but I assure you: it only seems that way. You’ve found us on the outskirts of one of the few working communities left in this area and they take care of their own.”

Sherlock pauses, looking him in the eye. “But there are...many unsavory elements that exist which I do not want attracted to my front door.”

He whistles, pointing at the vehicles, motions to the eager lieutenant to follow him, as John watches.

Molly comes up from behind, a mug of tea in her hands for him. “He’s...the same. Exactly the same. How is it he hasn’t changed? _Everything’s_ changed and he’s still...Sherlock?” John asks, accepting it.

Molly looks up, and he sees something flicker in her expression that he cannot name. “He has. More than he lets on,” Molly says, looking after him. “I just think he took it as a personal challenge not to let it show, though.” For quiet moments, they watch Sherlock direct the crew into a small orchard, dense with autumn leaves and the overgrowth. She opens her mouth to say something, but balks. Her hesitation lives a wanting life for a moment before the word bursts forth and her silence is broken. “Mary?” she asks, apprehensive.

John gives her a reassuring nod. “Yeah. Wanted to be here, actually, but she got a last minute outbreak to deal with. Our big public health crusader. Loves it. Think she enjoys her benevolent dictatorship entirely too much, actually. ”

“Good on her,” Molly sighs, relieved, happy. “I can’t believe it,” she says, pressing a hand to her face. “All this time. Oh, god!” she gasps. “Isabelle will be a teenager!”

“Oh, you can believe it. Time and tide be damned, God knowsthey don’t change. Setting a fine example for her brother.”

She glances up quickly, a happy sort of shock on her face. “You have a son, too?”

“Will,” he nods with pride. “Same age as Jon, abouts.”

Molly does a laugh-y sort of gasp thing. “Wow! Oh, John. Just... _wow._ ”

“You have _two,_ ” he replies, still not able to fully comprehend. “With Sherlock ‘married to my work,’ bloody Holmes.”

“Yeah.” She worries her mouth to the side in amusement, eyes cast down. “And two daughters." She dips her chin in a funny way, as if she was unused to explaining to people that she had children with the man. Huh. 

As John watches, the girls carry plastic water jugs from the house, filling coffee mugs and tea cups for his team. They take care pouring them out and handing them off to the officers. Jonathan appears with a large German shepherd, who promptly collapses in the grass as Privates Lessin and Azubini pet him. “His name’s Maxwell,” Jonathan is explaining. “Lil, give me some for him. He’s thirsty.”

“In a minute,” she answers as Violet carefully measures water into mugs.

“C’mon,” he badgers. “Pass it here.” When she hands him a cup, he promptly splashes some of it at her.

“Stop it, Jonathan!” Lily screeches. She actually stomps her foot.

John cannot, he just—With these— He _cannot_ stifle his astonishment. “Nope. I still can’t wrap my head around it. Four of them. Four little Holmses.”

“Hoopers,” Sherlock corrects, rejoining them. At John’s puzzled expression, he clarifies, “Didn’t want to be recognized. Happened a few times.” He glances at Molly, and John’s eye is drawn once more to the white scar along her face. “Didn’t end well.”

“Hooper Holmeses,” Molly settles quickly, and at her side, John does not miss the way Sherlock brushes the inside of her wrist and palm, just once. “Not that we’ve anything official. Town records are about as close to a census as you can get.”

“You did this, all on your own?" he marvels, looking at them, at the property, the farm. "Without technology, antibiotics, help, without...anything.”

“No, not entirely. It’s not complete isolation; you can’t survive that way. But it’s been _mostly_ us.” Molly says.

“Right. Well, those days are over.” John sets his mug aside on the garden wall, straightens up. “I’m John Watson and I’m here to rescue you.”

There’s a weird silence. “Oh my god,” Molly laughs at the absurdity. She dabs at her eyes again with her sweater.

 

* * *

 

John is introducing his team when Mike emerges from the barn. Maxwell leaps up and dashes to him, standing at attention until Mike feints right and then left, getting his pet hopped up and spinning in circles. He approaches the group of soldiers and glances at one, a tall lance corporal with dark hair and Asian features.

“ _Ni hao_ ,” he offers.

“Er, _ni hao_ ,” says the lance corporal, surprised.

“ _Qǐngwèn nǐjiào shěnme míng?_ ” Mike asks.

“ _Nǐ shì nǎguórén,_?” Violet inquires as Lily announces, “ _Wǒ jiào_ Lily.”

“They, uh, speak Chinese?” John scoffs, Molly has to grin at the pure astonishment on his face. She suspects it might be stuck.

“Mandarin. Some,” Sherlock admits, considering the snippets of conversation. “Accents need work.”

“Yeah, right. Of course,” John shakes it off. “Anyway. Sherlock, there’s, ah, someone here, well, someone you might recall. Major?” he beckons. “Sherlock this is–”

Molly watches Sherlock give the man a curious look. His eyes narrow as he works to place the face before him before saying “–Grenadier Officer Stephen Bainbridge. You’ve fared well, Major. My congratulations.” Bainbridge salutes, shakes his hand. The children’s attention shifts at the display.

“Thank you, sir. Your dad helped save my life, back in the day,” Bainbridge says to them proudly. “Him and Dr. Watson. Put away the man who tried to kill me, too. When Dr. Watson was recruiting from my unit, I told him I’d do anything to help find Sherlock Holmes. Owed him that much, at least.”

A sandy-haired young man hops down from one of the rovers with a box in his hand. She can’t help but notice the newness of his camo gear; the shine on his boots as he approaches. When he speaks, it is with a Welsh accent. “Ma’am, the lads was wondering: Have your little ‘uns, um, have they had sweeties before?”

“Not in a long time.” Molly glances down at Lily’s small, uncertain face. “Would you like to try?”

“Whatsit?” she asks, dubious.

The young Welsh officer – Lt. Cadogan, his nametag says – offers her a dark chocolate square.

She takes a tiny bite, wrinkling her nose at the hard texture before beaming. “It tastes good,” Lily says. “Sweet and...smooshy?” she puzzles.

Lt. Cadogan hands Molly a box stuffed with small, colored packets. “If it’s alright with you, we chipped in ours here from the ration kits.” He smiles gently at Violet’s befuddled expression as Lily offers a bite of her treat. “Thought yours might deserve it more than we do.”

Her throat tightens. Eyes tickling with gratitude.

Gratitude, and shame.

“Thank you,” she says.

 

* * *

 

Later, after the children have made friends of the newcomers, eaten, and returned to their play, John explains:

“Mycroft and his ilk did a fair bit in those last weeks before it came to head, but it still wasn’t much. We were in bunkers for a long time. Thought it would be a lot worse actually, but the ice cap is gone and, well, that far north, global warming isn’t so bad; silver lining, I guess. We’ve done alright. Going on best we can. Got a fair few self-sufficient communities set up across Scandinavia—Norway, Finland, Sweden. We’ve got food stores and greenhouses. Got about half a dozen members of the Swedish Academy teaching, if you can believe it. Scaling up clean energy, creating industry, security. It’s a good place. Safe. We have hope.”

“Poetic,” Sherlock drawls.

“It’s something,” John argues. “Look I’ll be the first to admit it isn’t perfect, not by far. But it’s a helluva a lot better than most of I’ve heard about and far more than what I’ve seen. We don’t turn people away. It’s working. Mostly. Things aren’t hopeless.”

Molly shakes her head. “But—How did you find us? Why now?”

John runs a hand through his hair. “Two very different questions, so I’ll start with the first: Three years ago we were able to gain control of some old American surveillance satellites. Since then we’ve been trying to assess what the situation is like across Europe, Asia, North America...Find the bright spots, and—” he tips his head. “The not so bright. Three and a half weeks ago, an aide brought me satellite surveillance images of this property. Between myself and your brother, we managed to muster up enough interest in retrieving you. ”

He pauses, looking over his folded hands. “Much of that was influenced by question two: For the past few months we’ve been worried that a nuclear reactor in the UK was in the process of failing. The team in charge of trying to take it offline had pulled out. Abandoned ship, as it were.”

“Where?” Molly asks, stricken.

He hesitates. “Torness.”

Her mouth hardens into a thin line. “That’s not forty miles from here,” she says, lowly.

John holds up a hand. “There is a lot we _don’t_ know. We know your lot tried to get some experts in there, but failed. Apparently. We don’t know the extent of the damage. But if a meltdown is imminent it could be bad. It could be very, very bad.”

“Exclusion zone?” Sherlock asks.

“Recommended. Twenty miles, minimum. Fifty is better. The problem is who maintains it. UN pulled out, and the ISPA doesn’t have the resources. They had enough problems maintaining the border. Now it looks like they’re planning to abandon it altogether.”

Molly’s eyes drift, her thoughts far-off, unfocused. “There are millions of desperate people on the other side.”

John looks down. “We think less than that, by now. But yes, it will certainly be overrun.”

Outside, darkness is gathering.

 

* * *

 

She pours fresh water into the trough as the old bull nudges her shoulder, licking at her neck. Molly ducks her head away, but pats him affectionately. “Nikola Tesla,” she huffs. “I think you’re getting flirty with me.”

“Not really his area, if I recall.”

She turns her head a very little, not looking back, and says over her shoulder. “The same could be said of this consulting detective fellow I once knew,” she says. “Even he fell for my womanly wiles eventually.”

“Lucky man.”

She does not answer, overcome with an anger at everything, and nothing.

“Molly?”

She takes a long, steadying breath, her fingers digging into Nikola Tesla’s coarse hairs. “Chocolate.” She glances over her shoulder, throat tight, her voice low. “Your children had never had chocolate.”

“You want to go,” Sherlock says, tone rich with suspicion.

She whips around. “You _don’t_?”

“Am I in a hurry to run back into the welcoming arms of ‘civilization’ after our last experiences with it? Not _exactly_ ,” he sneers.“Liable to be throttled given most _people_ have devolved into collections of the worst aspects of human nature.” he admits. “Pettiness. Cruelty. Crime.”

“That sort of thing used to appeal to you,” she reminds.

“That sort of thing used to keep _you_ employed,” he shoots back.

“There are good people left in this world. Look at Jenny and Amina and Dan. Lachlan. Cora. Sanj–”

“Sanjay is dead, need I remind you,” he spits.

She freezes in place, eyes locked on him. She, better than anyone, knows how deeply, vehemently, Sherlock Holmes abhors change. But this, _this_ reluctance is beyond her ability to reconcile. “Yes,” Molly says after a minute. “He is. Dead. Murdered. In our own clinic, Sherlock. By people I neither understand nor ever want to. Add to that, the fact that a degenerating nuclear reactor is mid-meltdown not two days walk from here—"

“Potentially,” he corrects.

She tips her head, stares at him in disbelief. _Are you fucking serious?_ She draws a long, deep, _deep_ breath. “Your best friend has spent months– _years_ , even–trying to find you. Your brother, he says, has directed every resource in his power to that cause. Does none of that mean anything?”

“Guilt, obviously. Rationalization.”

"Rationalization." She stares at him, aghast. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what? I’m not doing anything. Certainly not getting carried away with the fantasy of some miraculous Scandinavian safe haven,” he bites out, words and menace flashing fast as lightning. “You know where that kind of hoping leads, Molly. You’ve done enough of it.”

She shakes her head, unable to fathom his reticence. “What’s wrong with you? This is our chance. What we spent _years_ hoping for. What the hell happened to Sherlock Holmes?”

“I _am_ Sherlock Holmes.”

“But you’ve been living someone else’s life. You've been playing Will Hooper. Another disguise, just like you're acting right now.”

"You've been acting too, _darling_ ,” he sneers, and she'd be lying through her teeth if she said it didn't sting to hear. Jaw tight, head high, she disregards it. He's always known where to find the weak spots. And how to exploit them. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she throws a roughshod blanket over a the edge of Madame Curie’s stall, shoveling in a bit of hay and wild grasses. Her hands want for the sureness of purpose, as if by doing something like work then she can pretend this is just another one of a hundred conversations they'd had over titrations and biopsies, where her furtive assistance would help reveal some small clue. Some minor truth that would lead him to solve the larger puzzle. She leans her shovel against the barn wall. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t have a choice.”

“Of course there is a choice.”

“There is _nothing_ for them here. No formal education, no medicine, no culture. And the girls–” She scowls, worrying her molars, looking up at him. “Sherlock, I used to be a _scientist_ ,” she breathes.

“You _are_ a scientist,” he snidely points out. “The distinction isn’t lost just because your day job has changed.”

“You have two daughters,” Molly says. She walks in close to him, her face to his. If it is anything like his, a mirror of sentiments he does not want to see. “What kind of life do you think waits for them?” He looks away. “What opportunity is there left other than to become the breeding stock for some parochial dark age son?”

His head whips around furiously. “I will _never_ allow that to happen.”

“What happens as we get older? Weaker? Can you stop your cells dividing? Do you have a cure for cancer hiding in your pitiful excuse for a lab? How long do you think you can hold the sky up to keep it from falling on our heads?” She throws out her hands. “As outsized as your ego might be, you are not infallible, Sherlock.”

He glares at the floor. “I should think the last decade or so has proven that,” he bites off.

A heavy silence. Somewhere in the growing dark, a bird cries in the wood. She touches his arm. “We have been lucky. We can’t stay here, tucked away."

His lips curl. “Lucky.”

“We were inconceivably lucky to get out of London,” she tells him. “And utterly, _irrationally_ lucky that you weren’t murdered, that I wasn’t raped to death somewhere reduced to mobs and madness. That we didn’t get sick when so many people did. That we got this far, managed what we have. That Lily started breathing. That they survived every scrape and fever and have never had to fight for their lives by ending someone else’s. That last time–” They look away from each other. She blinks quickly, searching. “Yes, _lucky_ ,” she says, twining her index finger with his. “We’ve a little bubble from the world here, Sherlock. But it won’t last forever. Nothing does.”

He stays frozen, staring at the door.

“Talk to John,” she says, and leaves him to his thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who are speakers, please forgive my attempts at rendering a few lines in phonetic Mandarin. Although I relied on sources other than Google Translate, I cannot speak to their great superiority, nor, in fact, to their accuracy. Io studiato Italiano, cosi sono inutile. Also, Nikola Tesla was a brilliant, erratic , famously celibate scientist of the late 19th/early 20th century. Sound familiar? 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	4. Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Things are normal,” Jon says, putting his thumb on the place where London used to be. “It’s just the bad is our normal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: Please be aware, I am not tagging the whole story for child death, but that is a significant part of this chapter. Proceed as you will. 
> 
> Who is the best beta? [Amalia Kensington (amaliak01)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington/works?fandom_id=133185), that is who. My darling friend, who distracts me with her brilliant sketches and fascinating head canons, deserves credit for this story more than than anyone. J'adore. As ever, I have made a few changes following her review, so any typos and such are my fault.

* * *

“He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.”

 ― Margaret Atwood, _Oryx and Crake_  

* * *

 

Jono’s babbling on and on—something about Swedish fjords, which are not a thing, fjords being Norwegian (...he thinks) and doesn’t seem to care that Mike hasn’t said anything in response for the past five minutes. Mike pushes the curtain aside. John Watson’s soldiers have a watch around the house. Evenly distributed perimeter, eyes trained mostly toward the road leading to town. The direction where most of the population is situated. Where visitors might come from. Attacks.

It’s been a long time since anyone had come in the night. But he remembers. He feels better with John Watson’s soldiers nearby.

Mike lets the curtain fall closed.

“D’you think anyone’ll have seen them? There’s bound to be _loads_ of people talking about it at school tomorrow. Not everyday a brand new convoy shows up in town, is it? I bet Dylan Nichols’ is effing _green_ about it. He’s always gaping on about some bit ‘is Da’s got tucked away. _Grenades. Automatics_. Total lies. Utter shite. Expect everyone will be gabbing about it.” Jono’s accent always runs away a bit when they’re out of the parent’s earshot.

“Don’t think we’re going to school tomorrow,” Mike says. Their room is spare—one bed, one futon, a bookshelf mostly occupied by Jon’s collection of rocks and shells rather than books; walls lined with bits of maps; Jon’s huge wall of pictures, sketches, drawings. Mike shoves some clothes in his knapsack. There isn’t much he can’t live without.

Jono look up from his sketches, attention on him. “Why not?”

Mike looks over at his little brother, feels a stabby bit of sympathy. Kid’s working it out. He’s clever, but he’s just sometimes talking too much to notice things.

“You think they came here for a visit? This is a rescue mission.”

Jon cranes his neck toward the window.“Rescue?”

Mike adds a few dog-eared paperbacks into his pack: Elie Wiesel, _Night_. Walter Benjamin’s _On the Concept of History._ _A Canticle for Leibowitz_. “Those girls who were kidnapped. It’s not just St. Andrews and places down near the border where there’s tunnels under the fences or people get around in boats on real foggy nights. There’s bad stuff going on all over.”

His brother frowns. “Well, yeah, but it’s not how things used to be.

“Obviously,” Mike scoffs.

“No, I mean before things...settled, I s’pose. It’s not like it was. When things were really, really bad.”

Mike zips up his pack, sits on the futon opposite his brother. “Jono, why do you think Mum gets so sad when you drive her up the wall with questions about _when you were our age_...? Why you think Dad goes tearing off about some new project every time you ask about going to uni or the girls want stories about ‘lovely Londontown,’” he mimes, sarcastic. “None of this is _normal_. None of this is _okay_.”

Jon’s forehead crinkles, and Mike feels his gut sort of sink and lock up at once. How’s he supposed to explain to his nine-year-old brother that they’re falling into something unfathomable? Something crueler than what he’s read of National Socialism under the Third Reich; as big and mean and sweeping as Sherman burning his way through America; something older than savage Christian radicals and crusading Islamic fundamentalists; something gray, without a point, without justice, and without even a larger sense of _belonging_ to twist and pervert. A reality about survival not of the fittest, but of the most ruthless.

He runs hand through his hair. “Things have always been really bad. It’s just...We don’t know any better. ”

Jono’s quiet for a bit, looking out the window as the soldiers continue their patrol. “Wrong.”

“Sorry?”

He stands up and looks at his map of the world. “Things are normal,” Jon says, putting his thumb on the place where _London_ used to be. “It’s just the bad _is_ our normal.”

 

* * *

 

“What do you want to be when you grow up,” Sherlock asks his youngest child, bringing a quilt up to cover her and her sister. He kneels next to Violet, at their bedside, and leans his head in hand.

Violet’s bright eyes sparkle. “A professor, like at Hogwarts! Or maybe a doctor?” she says, her career options limited by what she’s observed in her young life. Her voice is just a whisper, as if divulging a very important secret. “Only real though, no’ with magics.”

“Not magic,” he repeats, attempting to correct her occasional Scottish accent, which bothers him. For reasons.

“I’m going to be an aminal doctor!” Lily interjects. Loudly.

“ _An-i-mal_. And that kind of doctor is called a veterinarian.”

“I’ll have cows and sheeps and cats and dogs and rabbits and birds–” Lily chatters, mostly to herself.

Violet snuggles against his shoulder. She considers him, hesitant to ask. “Can I go where Mummy did? At St. Barts Hospital in the city of London?” She says it like it’s a fairy land, something she’s heard in stories. Somewhere that isn’t real.

“No. London is gone. You know that.”

“What about doctors? Can I still help people from getting sick?” His daughter looks up at him, her face nothing but huge eyes and fine, little bones.

Violet weighs eight and a half pounds less than her sister. She is often weak, spacey. Her coughing fits make Molly visibly flinch and her mouth pinch into a thin line of worry.

“Of course,” he replies, and tells himself it is the truth.

“Course,” she repeats.

“Though,” he amends. “Not always.”

"Yes," Violet answers with such pure, unvarnished frankness that it takes him aback. “I know.”

“–and fish and deer and squirrels and snails, but _not_ snakes. Snakes are awful," Lily finishes.

“What about dragons?” Sherlock teases.

Lily perches her tiny chin on Violet’s shoulder, puzzled. “Didn’t they go extinct like the tigers and the elephants?” she asks, entirely serious.

He frowns. “Mmm, no, dragons aren’t real. They’re just a story.”

“Oh.” Shrugs. Lily hugs her sister and cuddles against her back, tickling. They both laugh and giggle, tiny arms and legs flailing under the quilt. He should calm them, or they’ll work themselves up into balls of energy, but he watches, transfixed, unable to bring himself to silence their laughter. The excitement of the day, however, has spun much of their usual mischief out of them. After a few moments, their childish belly laughs abate, and they lean heavily into their pillows, weary.

“Sing the bug-bird song,” Violet says, sleepily.

“The what?”

“The bugs’ song. About the sad bird,” Lily clarifies, exasperated.

“Blackbird,” Molly's voice carries from the door. “The Beatles?”

“Ah.”

“That one,” Violet answers. “Please?”

Molly sits on the opposite side of the bed behind Lily and settles her arm across them both. She brushes Violet’s hair off her face. Of all their children (even more so than clever, stubborn Mike) he finds Violet to be the most similar to either of her parents. She reminds him of Molly two decades before, when he’d conscripted a twenty-six-year-old doctor in the midst of her foundation training to monitor his lab experiments. Gentle, skittish, with great wells of emotion below a sweet-natured surface. When she has energy enough for them to show.

“ _Blackbird singing in the dead of night_ ,” Molly sings.

Logically, he knows she is no great vocalist. Not even a middling one. Nevertheless, he is always warmed by the melodies she hums, the tunes she gracelessly carries. He expects that is what love means, to know a person’s faults and not care that they exist. If so, it is a testament to Molly’s character. Her flaws are nothing beside his own.

“ _Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arrive_.”

Lily and Violet have Molly’s pale crescent-moon jaw, as delicate as porcelain dolls, which they have never owned. He kisses their foreheads. “Good night, Iris. Good night, Daisy.”

Eyes closed, Lily smiles sleepily. “Silly.”

“Exceptionally.”

He catches Molly’s eye before he goes.

In the next room, Jon stares at the maps on his wall. Scraps of paper are tacked around the room like a collage, sketches and expressions and landscapes he’s drawn. His son’s clues; his evidence of a gone-away world, and the one that survived it. Jon points to a crossroads on the edge of the Baltic Sea. _Timra_.“That’s where Major Bainbridge says they’ve been building in Sweden. He says they got thousands of people there now.” He taps another site on the far north coast of Norway. “Here, too.” _Anderdalen_.

“Yes,” Sherlock says. “I expect they do.”

“John’s son is my age. His name is William Scott Watson.” He looks up at his father, unnecessarily clarifying, “After you. Like I’m Jon Hamish.”

“Yes.”

He marks the small dot of Timra, Sweden, then Anderdalen, Norway, with a pen, placing a black X over the town. The symbol of unknown values and hidden treasure.

“Dad?” Jon asks. “What happens now? Are we going with them? To Sweden or wherevers?”

“Now,” Sherlock flicks off the lamp, “you sleep.”

 

* * *

 

The wireless band is empty, again. Unsettling. It echoes the cognitive dissonance in his head. Conflicting rationales: The desire to stay; the need to leave.

“I know about Dr. Patel,” says a familiar voice from the door. “And the girls in St. Andrews.”

Sherlock looks up as Mike steps down from the stair to the house, settles across him at the lab table. Slightly _more_ unsettling, himself in miniature.

“People say it’s happening all over. Foreigners getting blamed. Or just folks who look and act different. Girls disappearing. People say they make ‘em join these churches, marry old men and have babies they don’t want. Donal Reid said one of the girls in Aberdeen was twelve. _Twelve_. My age.”

He scoffs, and rises to his feet. He grabs a circuit board off a shelf and narrows his eyes, examining the capacitors for signs of damage. “Donal Reid is a gossip.”

“A gossip with a cousin in every county here to Inverness, seems. And he’s not a liar.”

“He–”

Mike slams his fist on the table. Hard. Sherlock looks up, taken aback. “I do like you taught us!” Mike shouts. “I listen. I _observe_. But no one wants to _talk_ about what’s happening. There wasn’t delivery from Glasgow last week and there isn’t one coming next. Dr. Patel, _our friend_ , was beaten to death in the clinic he _and_ Mum work in. What if she had been there when it happened?” He glares daggers. “And Violet’s not getting better.”

“I realize–”

“ _Nothing_ is going to get better!”

“I’m not a child, Mycroft!” he replies, raising his voice. “I understand very well what has become of civilization. I was there when it ended.”

Slowly, Mike rises to his feet, coming to stand before him. He tips his chin up. Soon he won’t need to. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t want my sister to die,” his son says. Sherlock knows he has chosen his words to have great effect. They do.

“I don’t want Lily to disappear,” Mike says, his voice low and fierce, like Molly’s truest, blackest rage. “It’ll kill Jono. Inside. It will kill Mum. We have to _leave_.”

Mike’s serious hazel eyes _burn_ with fury, with purpose. There’s no logic to his son’s face. To why someone who looked so young could be so old.

He had not been there the night Mike was born. A last-ditch search for supplies and for medicine ended in a brutal beating when he’d come across a group of three men by surprise. He’d won, eventually, but a blow to the head and a knife wound in his back rendered him unconscious not long after he stumbled away from the scene. Two days later, he’d woken in the brush off a highway onramp. Dazed, dehydrated, his senses blurred by the assault, he had wandered erratically for another endless day until he was able to find his way back to the shelter of relative safety where he had left Molly—an empty coffee shop where water still ran from the taps and, by some miracle, there was a functional gas stove able to provide boiling water for sterilization.

His hands had shaken with the effort to open the lock. Once inside, his heart had stopped at the sight awaiting him.

 _I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry_ , he heard Molly cry, apologizing again and again to the mewling newborn in her arms. _I’m sorry._ For what, he did not know. Sorry she had survived, that life went on when so much else did not? That her child’s father was not there and might not be coming back. When she lifted her head and saw him, she broke with relief, biting her lip and crying his name. He fell to the floor beside her, repeating her words back. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry._ That he could not get her out. That she had been alone. That her son–oh God, _their son_ –lay wrapped in a tatty tea towel on the linoleum floor of an abandoned cafe.

“My dad was Michael,” Molly had said, finally, touching their son’s nose with her index finger. “I want to call him Mike. For my father and for your brother.” Her eyes sought his. “Mycroft Michael Holmes.”

“Hooper,” he said. From the first time he’d been recognized, they had practiced a dedicated form of discretion; her name had become his alias. In his addled, battered state, he had a vague idea that her name would make their child more of Molly than of him. The best possible outcome.

Twelve years later, Sherlock is aware of all the ways his hopes have become true, and have not. His son’s character goes beyond the sum of his genetic parts. It is something more. More than his father’s intellect and his mother’s compassion; more than Molly’s fractured hope and hidden tears; more than their darkest expectations and clutching remorse. Something that belongs only to Mike. He is a longing for coffee when there was none to be had. He is long walks to into town, deductions games in a crowd, and the disappointment of a difficult market day that made the return trip twice as far. He is mismatched shoes and thrice-mended shirts, a mistrust of strangers, and a prowess at self-defense that has little to do with personal interest and everything to do with staying alive. He is the eagerness to fix broken things; a trip out in the cold dawn to spare Molly the trouble. He is handstands in grassy fields at last light, a desperate thirst for history; a faculty for language that outpaces his own. He is loneliness, and fear, and love. A slow-burning, teenage anger, which is justifiable, and a control over it, which is not.

All children, Sherlock Holmes is beginning to understand, no matter their parentage, belong to themselves first of all. Only now is he beginning to catch a glimmer of the man his son is becoming.

Sherlock pulls his first child close, wrapping him in his arms. “I know.”

 

* * *

 

Later, pipe in hand, John finds him sitting on the garden wall. John always finds him.

“Why don’t you...do, what you do? The experiments, yeah. The tinkering. But you don’t do the puzzles anymore. Try to solve crimes?”

Sherlock shrugs. “Criminal behavior isn’t particularly interesting anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because, John,” he blows a puff of smoke, watches it vanish into the dark. “Everyone is a criminal.”

John coughs, looking sharply down, up. He is trying not to push. “You can tell me, you know. About it.”

Sherlock is silent. Useless, explaining. What good would come of it? John would only feel more guilt, and whatever traumas he had experienced would not be resolved through conversation; sharing would not be absolution for what became of England as it fell. The reality that had confronted anyone who’d had the temerity to survive grew more hyperreal with each week that passed: Abduction, gang rape, murder.

None of them had been puzzles.

There was no point to telling him what a blow it had been to find his childhood home empty, his parents vanished without a trace much the same way Gregory Lestrade and Billy Wiggins and Sally Donovan and Mrs. Hudson disappeared, one by one, in the last days.

There was no sense to the things that had come later:

The hunger.

The desperation.

The terrifying hours when Molly disappeared after she learned she was pregnant, and the long days she went mute after she had reappeared, empty handed of the pharmaceuticals she had sought. How she cried without sound and scratched her scalp bloody with anxiety. He can still see the black crescents of her nails, the wild, desperate panic her eyes.

Other memories surface at John's words—The press of a knife against his throat. Running. A broken mirror and Molly’s blood. The sounds the man had made begging for his life. Sherlock had not been accommodating.

Lily, her skin tinged blue, born with the cord around her neck, preventing her from breathing.

Violet, bright with fever, listless, stricken with chronic respiratory infections they were beyond the ability to heal. His certainty that that Jonathan’s innate optimism would not survive the years ahead. Mike, wearing a flinty hardness like clothes that do not yet fit, but will. Soon.

Screams of pain and fear. The loamy scent of newly dug earth. The black defeat of loss.

He has done terrible things to keep them alive. Sherlock does not regret it. But long ago John had shown him how to embrace his humanity without cost to himself. What good would it do to reveal the myriad ways he’s abandoned those lessons?

He doesn’t realize he’s speaking any of this aloud until John responds.

“I’m sorry,” John says. “I’m so sorry. I never wanted any of this.”

“I know,” he says. “But it wasn’t your decision, John. It was mine.”

“But you haven’t.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Lost your humanity. Any of it. You’ve grown more than I ever thought possible,” John shakes his head. A tense silence hangs between them. The guilt, again. He feels awkward. Neither had forgotten the depth of their friendship, that was obvious. But they no longer seemed to know how to be friends.

“I’m so proud of you,” John says at last. “And I don’t know how you did it and I don’t care what you had to do. But I find it amazing. How you kept them safe. Caring for them, just _having_ them at all. Christ, Sherlock, one would be a miracle. Threes times over–”

Wind blows in the dying trees. Oak and ash and hazel. “Four.”

“Right, four of them,” John corrects. Sherlock bites his pipe. He is unable to say more. Not now. “I just want you to know—whatever you had to do, it doesn’t matter. And I’ll always listen, if you ever need it. You hear me?” John implores.

His mouth twitches. “Taking the therapy to heart, John? Still?”

A smile. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

“Don’t need a therapist. I’ve a pathologist.”

John scoffs.“Handier than you’d expect, apparently.”

“Yes,” he smiles. “And useful, too.”

They laugh. A little at first, and then more. Not because puns are particularly funny, he supposes, but because the tension, the distance between them, needs the breaking. John wipes at his eyes. “God! No, it’s too soon. I can’t-!” He cuts off as giggles regroup.

“How do you think we ended up with so many of them?” Sherlock adds, biting back on his own. It feels good.

“Shhh!” John hisses. When the silence settles again, it no longer seems as fraught. “Ah. I’ve missed this.”

“Yes. Me too, John.”

“The bit for the satellites. 221B. Brilliant.”

“Hmm. A shot in the dark,” Sherlock says. “My SOS.” He clicks his teeth against the pipe.

“I know, Sherlock.” John lays a hand on his shoulder, and for the first time in a very long while, he feels like something makes sense. “I heard you.”

 

* * *

 

The children have long since gone to sleep when Sherlock crawls into bed beside her, pulling her close against him. His arm curls around her waist, his fingers threading hers.

“I am aware,” he rumbles in her ear. “That even if a flood of radioactive isotopes were not imminent, then there still would not be a future here.” He traces the bones of her wrist, turning her ringless hand over in his.

She turns over to look at him, his eyes dark, glimmering. “I know you are. And I know that you’re also terrified.”

“I’ve been terrified for thirteen years, nine months, seven days, and some-odd hours.”

“No, Sherlock,” she says against his mouth. “Much longer than that.”

It’s slow and hushed, the wild desperation of encounters past have, by now, resolved into the gentle, certain movements of unhurried partners who have come to prefer the slow passion of steadiness to frantic, heated abandon. His breath is warm, his mouth slides, delicious, along her throat. She aches for him, with every part of her–heart, mind, body. His forehead presses against her as she arches into his touch, dizzied by him just as she was the first time, so long ago, in the heavy silence of his childhood home, when questions stemmed ten-fold from the head of every answer, and their griefs greatly outnumbered their hopes.

She gulps huge, silent breaths when he shudders, gasping fast against her collarbone, and comes inside her. A risk they haven’t taken in years; even as the chances of another conception diminished, they knew the dangers far more intimately. An ache forms, a different one, and the pain of it is no longer surprising. It is amazing, she feels, how she has learned to live with it. She peppers kisses along his brow, clinging to him, running her hands against his back, the smooth, sweat-slicked curve of his neck. She knows the meaning his recklessness conveys. She rakes her fingernails through his hair. This man. This anchor. This torment.

“Is it so wrong?” His voice rumbles through her. “To want to keep from it? The world is not kind, and has never been fair.”

“It was not,” she agrees, tasting him.

Molly shifts, tucks her head beneath his chin, pressing her cheek against the warm dampness of his body. She slides her lips along his throat and curls her fingers against his shoulder blade. She hooks a leg over his hip as his arms encircle her, and it’s everything she’s lived for, this, here, them. His chest pressed to hers, she can feel the beat of his heart.

“Maybe now the world can be what we make it,” she whispers.

 

* * *

  

In the morning, the children are told. Mike, unsurprised, relieved; Jonathan, torn between excitement and shock; Violet, acquiescing, though sadly. Only Lily cries, pitching a fit because they cannot take Newton or Maxwell, Madame Curie or Nikola Tesla. It takes a healthy chunk of chocolate and Stephen Bainbridge’s tales of the greenhouses and gardens in Norway to calm her down.

“Oh, you should see it, Lily, there are all kinds of animals!” Bainbridge says, and explains about the wildlife he’s seen in his occasional travels.

“Think she’s getting starry-eyed,” Molly says, smirking.

“Hmm. In the interest of avoiding another tantrum, probably best if you didn’t mention it that he’s married to a German teacher he met during his service,” Sherlock says, taking a sip of watery herbal tea. “Who happens to be male.”

Molly’s mouth twitches with a small smile. “I took something out for you. Upstairs.”

She raises her eyes to the ceiling, indicating to their bedroom as she slips through the door. Through the window he follows her; Molly gathers the last of the blooming flowers –most gently worn and faded– into a bunch and walks off. He takes the stairs. Laid out across the bed is something he’d not seen in a very long time. Something he thought he’d left behind. Something, apparently, she had not.

His Belstaff.

 

* * *

 

“Oh, not the coa–” John stops in his tracks beside one of the vehicle, since removed from the orchard, and throws up his hands. “Yeah. Dunno why I’m surprised. Got a nicotine patch on your arm too?”

“If wishing made it so, John,” Sherlock replies, sighing heavily and only half joking. He turns, searching the edges of the property.

John opens his mouth, concerned about the footprints Arlington and Azubini had found. Someone had wandered the edge of the field recently. Watching. A second and third set of tracks joined in, elsewhere down the road. But the appearance of the Belstaff fazes him momentarily. Evidence, finally, that Sherlock Holmes has come back to life.

Not the first time, that.

His best friend searches. Molly is halfway along the path past the barn, skirting the edge of the woods, a bunch of flowers in her hand.

Mike stands by the woodpile, ax in hand. He nods after his mother. “You should go.”

Sherlock turns to his son. “Will it make any difference?”

“No. But it will make her feel better.”

Sherlock nods, considers the ground, and follows in her wake.

“Where are they going?” John asks, tipping his head as he walks up to the two boys.

Jonathan follows his gaze. “Mum wanted to say goodbye, I think.”

John’s brows screw up. “To?”

Sherlock’s younger son kicks a stone as the figures of his parents disappear into the trees. “Our sister,” he says softly.

“But–” _your sisters are over there_ , he starts to say. The words die before they are spoken. A terrible thing makes itself known in the back of his brain.

“The other one,” Mike says. He slashes a log split through the middle with his axe. He rests a second before throwing it into the stump. He looks up at John, his face carefully schooled, but grief and anger and sadness hanging on all the same.

“Hazel.”

 

* * *

 

He finds Molly kneeling before the stones. She places the last of the autumn roses, the morning glories, the Queen Anne’s lace around the base of the stone cairn that is Hazel’s small grave. There are no markings. No headstone. Their last child, who breathed one, two, three small gasps of air before she died. There is nothing left to say she ever lived.

Sherlock Holmes will remember those three impossible breaths every day of his too-long life.

Molly does not stir. “I used to wonder,” she says after a time. “If things had been like they were before, if maybe she’d have lived. And I know that doesn’t make sense. Because none of this would have happened and we wouldn’t be here or have them. That she’d never have been–”

“Molly–” he says, warning.

“No, _I know_. I know. And it’s stupid that I feel like we’re leaving her behind. That I feel like she’ll be alone here because we’re never coming back. Logically I know that’s insane, I know that.”

She shakes her head. “She’s not even here. She was barely ever was.”

 

* * *

 

“She was too little,” Violet says, swinging his hand.

“That,” John tries to say. “That can happen, sometimes.”

“She was born too soon. Dr. Patel tried to help, but her lungs didn’t work right,” Lily adds. “I don’t remember her, but Jon says he does. Mike doesn’t like to talk about it. He doesn’t like babies because he is such a grump!” She makes a face as if to say, _Right_?

“Right,” John swallows.

 

* * *

 

He kneels behind her, pulling her back against him. Molly relaxes into his embrace, her inhumane strength giving out a little. He holds her up, to him, as she grips at the backs of his hands, shaking. He supports her; this is support.

“The first law of thermodynamics–” He tucks the the curtain of long hair behind her ear. Her skin is warm against his lips. “–says that no amount of energy in a system is ever lost. Only transferred.” Molly slides her hands higher, holding his arms, comforting him while he comforts her. An unconscious instinct. It is one of the things he loves about her most. “It doesn’t matter that we’ll never be here again.”

“I know,” she whispers.

“It doesn’t matter, because every atom we are, every molecule we breathe, is one she is part of. Every photon her eyes and ours saw, every scrap of energy that made her, survives.” He thinks of his parents, and of her father. Of Mrs. Hudson and Greg Lestrade. Mike Stamford. Phillip Anderson. Irene Adler. Sally Donovan. Jim Moriarty. Sebastian Wilkes. People he had liked. People he had despised. Been captivated by. Cared for.

Lives, he’d been slow to understand, could touch one another and be forever changed by the event. Transformed. Not just added to, but altered so as to become something else entirely. Something utterly new.

“I know,” Molly’s voice hitches. “I know.”

She keeps repeating it

_(I’m sorry, I’m so sorry)_

and he wants to tell her that he does not. He has never known how to deal with any of this. He wants to tell her that even if everything he says is scientific fact, the facts have no meaning in this context because they once had a child that nothing—not his abilities, not her medicine or love—had been able to save. A phenomena he had observed firsthand and yet a reality that went against against all the laws of nature. The result is something he cannot, even now, begin to reconcile.

Sherlock Holmes does not say that, though. The emotions are messy, but there is a gentle comfort to the science. Something, he feels, that is warm-blooded and sustaining. He hopes he is doing, saying, the right things. Love is a thing he only ever understands in limited context. A circle made by arms; an expression without limit; a bond of fundamental force.

 

* * *

 

The sounds of voices ring out from the beach. Molly takes off her shoes and walks down to the water, standing beside Mike in the white shallows. He’s taller than her now. The difference is clear. Jon sits with Maxwell, his unusual silence speaking all that need be said about his emotional state. Sherlock thinks of Redbeard.

From the darkness of the past: _I’m sorry._

John appears over his shoulder.

“I didn’t understand what you meant, last night.” Sherlock glances back. “You said four. I thought you meant them. But...You meant four pregnancies.”

“Yes.”

“Mate–”

As he watches, his children play in the sand. They watch the waves. They live the lives they have been given.

“Let it go, John.” There is nothing else to say. He looks to his best friend. “Do not feel guilty. It isn’t worth it.”

John's mouth twitches. He steps forward and clasps his arm. “You did good, Sherlock. Very, very good.”

“Hmm.”

They watch the birds rise over a slate gray sky. “Know what we called it? This place?”

“What?”

A wave of nostalgia floods. Sherlock grins. “Baker field.”

John squeezes his arm again. “When you’re ready.”

He watches from the dunes, turning a blade of long shore grass over in his hand. Mike hoists Lily onto his back. Molly gathers her shoes.

Jonathan takes a stick of driftwood in hand. Rising, he chucks it down the beach, as far as he is able. Maxwell takes off. Jonathan turns and walks away, wiping at hot tears. Sherlock puts a hand to his shoulder as he attempts to pass; Jon looks down, away, lip quavering. Sherlock pulls him in close. Jon is stiff, but gives in after a beat, and he can feel the hiccuping gasp’s of his son’s silent sobs. Along the beach, Maxwell has moved on to chase shores birds into the spray, running far and away along the beach.

Jon calms, wiping at his face without looking up. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Sentimental.”

“Happens to the best of us.”

Jonathan cracks a tiny smile. Mike walks up with Lily. He says nothing, but hands his brother a perfect, complete sand dollar.

“Thanks.”

Molly follows, Violet’s hand in hers.

“Ready?”

“Almost.”

The wind catches in her hair, blowing it wildly across her face. Something in him clenches at the sight. At all of this. He twists the blade of grass over and around her ring finger, ties it off. “Molly Hooper,” he says. She smiles, tangles her index finger with his.

“You and me,” she answers.

Violet lingers in the sand as Molly heads back through the dune grass to the field and the farm.

He watches her walk away before bending down to lift his daughter up. She wraps her arm around his neck, staring out at the gray ocean. He tips his head against hers, recites:

 

_I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,_  
_My journey done where the world ended._  
_I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,_  
_The sound of the water, and the water’s reply._

 

Violet watches the play of the waves, eyes lifting. Together they track the path of a gull across the flat sky. “Time to go,” she says.

“Time to go,” he answers.

They leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Please let me know what your thoughts are :) 
> 
> The lines Sherlock recites to Violet are from a poem called, appropriately enough, [The End of the World](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175699) by Dana Gioia. 
> 
> His speech to Molly comes from a great segment [I heard on NPR](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4675953) called "Why you want a physicist to speak at your funeral."


	5. Spectres

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A burst of gunfire screams through the air. 
> 
> “Not quite so inconspicuous as you’d hoped, then,” Sherlock mutters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those who follow me on tumblr have seen my notes and snippets over the last few weeks about trying to wrap this story up. I can't tell you how many times I've rewritten and revised and scowled at this chapter. A beast, truly. I'm quite annoyed with myself for having taken so long to complete it, though in my defense, I've been busy with a few things. Work. Promotions. Moving around the world. Yanno, the usual excuses. Thank you for your extreme patience, sweet readers. And for sticking with this ridiculous story. 
> 
> My deepest thanks and endless gratitude to the brilliant and gifted (and supremely forgiving) **[ArtbyLexie](artbylexie.tumblr.com)** / **[Amalia Kengsington](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington/works?fandom_id=133185)** for her kindness, encouragement, and attention to detail. I've made—as ever—some more changes since she reviewed this, so all mistakes are mine. 
> 
> And yes, you're reading the chapter numbers correctly; it has grown again. Don't fret. The end, such as it is, is near.

 

* * *

“Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.”

― Joyce Carol Oates, _Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time_

* * *

 

The engines turns over—a hungry, reaching growl punching that punches to life in a 110 decibel fury striking her eardrums with a roaring rush of memory. Anxious familiarity thrums in Molly Hooper’s blood as the cars begin to roll down the path. She worries her fingers against the back seat-belt hook above Violet’s head and stares through the tinted glass in a daze, shocked into a kind of numbness by the emotional weight of...well, _everything_. Vanishing girls. Sanjay. Torness. Scarcity and sickness and John Hamish Watson. On the beach, the sight of gulls hanging on thermals above the breakers had surfaced the strange dream of summer holidays from the day before. Had so much really happened in such a short period of time?

Dead leaves whip against the cab. Molly’s eyes wander, taking in the landscape a final time. She follows the land out to the east, finds orchards and fields dipping away. The rocky path, leading down to the beach, and beyond it, the gray white swells of the North Atlantic, bends out of sight. Home. She will never see it again; she knows this, and with that knowledge comes a twisted, specific internal conflict—gratitude complicated by remorse, relief tinged by sorrow. It is every bit as unfathomable to think she will never see this place again as it feels—even still—to know she will never again set eyes on the endless gleaming escalator at the Angel Tube station, or the great granite edifice of St. Bart's. She will never again text with her uni friends. Snuggle her cat. Laugh with her father. He died before she had finished her second year at Cambridge and the loss of him remains as sharp as it had been nearly three decades before. Pinpoint precise, but deep down, too. Undeniably present, though smoothed over, now; altered by time.

The coastline vanishes. 

The trees crowd out her view. 

Fog drifts in. 

Molly Hooper watches the streak of bough, of cloud, of stone. 

They have all been altered by time.

Violet sniffs. Molly rests her chin against her daughter’s head. She waves a parting thought to the little house between water and wild.  
And then it, too, is gone.

 

* * *

 

Sherlock taps his fingers restlessly against the seatback. Over the din of the engines, John is explaining:

“The ship is anchored a few miles out. Smaller craft brought us in; I’ve a team with it at the dock. They know we’re en route and will have us set to disembark straight off. From there we’ll rendezvous with the _Hesperides_ and be on our way.”

Sherlock absorbs the details, walks through the steps of the plan, calculates their going rate and arrival time given their progress. An hour, maybe less to the former air base, depending on the quality of the road. He’d prefer a known route, one maintained by the ISPA, one he knows well, or barring that, knows at all. From there, another hour to the vessel off-shore. A day or more likely two in transit to Norway. A great deal to happen in not very much time. He does his best to ignore the raw anxiety that has been at work in his mind and gut since the previous evening. The information about Torness explained some of the mysteries that had lingered in the back of his mind for weeks now. Others...

“Is it big?” Jon asks. “Your ship?”

John nods an encouraging smile. “Oh, it’s big. I’ll give you the full tour the minute we’re off.”

Jon considers this. “I’ve never been on a boat.” He leans his head in his hand. “Suppose that will be interesting.” Resigned to his fate, he heaves a little sigh and looks out the window. Though his typical cheer is muted in the face of leaving the only home he has ever known, and with it his pets, his friends, his community, he had chosen to focus on the bright side; the good that comes from great difficulty. A natural optimist, even now. Remarkable. It makes something pull in Sherlock’s chest. A tightening, and loosening; a knot slowly coming undone.

On his far side, he looks to where Mike is leaning over the seat, watching Private Lessin manipulate the gears of the vehicle. Mike’s eyes flick over the wheel, pedals, the gauges on the dash, the iconography console. Occasionally he asks a minor question. What is that indicator? What does that button control? Or that switch, there? He blinks rapidly, leans back a hair when a spray appears suddenly on the windshield.

“Windshield fluid,” Lessin grins, turning his head against the seatback. “Clears the dirt, bugs, that sort of shit.” John dips his chin in disapproval. Mike, though, could care less about foul language. He’s too engrossed in observation. He watches. Listens. Learns. As he does, some of Sherlock’s own emotional uncertainty gives way, momentarily, for the ache of pride for how his sons are coping with the upending of their lives. Later he will tell Molly about the Mike’s questions, about Jonathan’s resolute acceptance. She will feel pride too, he is certain. A happy distraction from her own emotionally-charged state of mind; given the events of the day, yesterday, all days, she will be lifted by their maturity, their capability. A contrast to the twins currently, no doubt. At this, he taps his fingers, restless. He regrets not taking charge of the girls; Lily almost certainly will be whining a stream of constant commentary, while Violet—

His jaw tightens. Violet.

“John.” He leans forward over the seatback as John glances back over shoulder, waits for him to speak. It is difficult, somehow, to look him in the eye. “I take it there is a ships’ medical facility aboard the _Hesperides_?”

John nods. “Course.”

The good that comes from great difficulty, he reminds himself. “When we arrive, it is important that the infirmary be prepared to treat an advanced incidence of pediatric pneumonia. Likely pleural effusion, possibly infection and–”

“Mate,” John interrupts. “Surgeon already has a first course of tetracycline prepped.” He reaches up, takes Sherlock’s elbow. “Ready and waiting. She’s gonna be fine.”

 _Oh_. He purses his lips. “Yes. Well. Good.”

He sits back. Mike is considering him over his shoulder, ever stern, ever stoic. His eldest nods, offers a half-smile. “She will.”

Sherlock turns his face from the road, the trees, the hills, allowing himself to turn his gaze inward, revisits what information John and his crew have shared about Anderalen, about Mycroft, and the life that awaits them. Folding his arms across his chest, he contemplates what sort of future waiting his children beyond the pale lives they’ve lived. He falls into his still well-ordered Mind Palace as their convoy presses on.

This, he decides later, is the first of several mistakes.

 

* * *

 

Outside, three of John’s soldiers hold fast to metal grips and rails attached to the vehicle frame, keeping eyes up on the road and their surroundings. Molly sits with Lily and Violet in the middle car. Theirs follows Lt. Cadogan and three others, whose names she has forgotten, in the lead.

In the passenger seat in front of her, Major Bainbridge keeps his focus out the window. The forest streaks past on either side, and the girls stare, transfixed, for a time, by the quickness of their pace, by the hypnotic stream of color. Lily begins to fidget, unaccustomed to seat belts and sitting still for more than thirty seconds at a time.

The broken track carries them further and further from the farms and homes she knows.

As they pass the turn-off to Cora Hartle’s cottage, Molly is stricken by a spike of guilt. The feeling is similar to what she felt the moment John Watson explained the dire timeline he was working against. How far he had come, and for them, and them alone. There are other doctors in other communities, she knows, but none so close. Of course, if Torness were to go into full-on meltdown, there is little any doctor would be able to do for anyone in a hundred miles. Further, maybe, if the wind shifts from south west to south east. Molly leans her cheek against Violet’s hair. Her guilt, complicated by so many emotions, is soothed only by the knowledge that she is making the choice any parent would make—the one that keeps her children alive.

Bare, black branches of claw at the slate sky. She is adrift, lost to thoughts, memories. Lily hums and chatters with Stephen Bainbridge and their driver Lt. Azubini, more than once trying to climb over the divide. The belt and Molly thwart her movements, which only serves to make Lily scowl and wrench at her restraints. She whines with a quality that is uncannily reminiscent of Sherlock. Sulks. Tugs at her shoelaces, pulling them out and making string games of them as she resumes chatting away again. Lily, much like Jonathan, can always be counted on to fill a silence.

Against Molly’s far side, Violet is lulled into a doze by the dull roar of the engine, the vibration of tires. Her head thunks gently against Molly’s side. She snuggles closer, shivering a little. Molly rubs her back and arms, the contact pulling her back to the present and the only thing that matters now. She twists Violet’s long hair into a loose braid, admiring the glints of gold and reddish brown that catch the light. Much like Jon’s. Somewhere, there was a ginger or two in their genetic history. She smiles, imagining Sherlock with wild auburn curls–

There is no moment of warning. Molly is thrown suddenly forward as Azubini slams on the brakes, bringing the car to a sudden, violent halt. Pain digs across her breastbone as the belt holds her tight. “Ouch!” Lily complains, offended by the motion.

 _Thunk thunk SCREECH_ the front end of the car before them crashes erratically to the right. Balance utterly thrown off, the wheels spin, scrabbling at the frictionless air before it rolls, flips over, once, twice. It rests heavily on its roof. The wheels spin, spin, spin.

The radio bursts to life. She recognizes John’s voice, shouting for a response. – _over. Weinberg, do you read? Cadogan, repeat, do_ –

The radio console bleats static and voices.

Molly blinks, peering through the window. Beside her, Violet sits up, suddenly alert, her small eyes moving lightning fast. “Mummy?”

She places a hand on each of their crowns. “Get down,” Molly implores. “Get down now. Major?” she asks.

“It’s alright,” Bainbridge says before he launches out of the side door.

Violet looks straight ahead, her pale eyes each a wide and unsettled ocean. Her fingers grip at the seat belt. “No it isn’t.”

 

* * *

 

“What the fuck?” Lessin shouts.

As they watch, the lead car flips on its side—the groan of metal, the screech of tires on pocked, dessicated dirt and asphalt. There’s a burst of a gunning engine before it cuts out fast, and the screaming gravel screen against steel-plating, half-absorbed by the earth and ground, before the vehicle flips once more, landing on its side.

John takes the radio in hand before they’ve even stopped. “Cadogan!” He crows the soldiers names into the receiver. “Lee! What the hell happened?”

“ _Bainbridge here, sir_ —” the radio crackles. “ _LR1 is down. Something hit them. Something hit them in the road. They spun out, like a tire blew, but both of them on the one side, I think_ —”

 _Fuck_. John barks out orders. Torvik and Olesson are already booking it for the overturned Land Rover when he shoves out the door, with Azubini and Greene on their tail. He shoves out the door, shouting directives. The men are organized; approaching the crash site with caution, surveying their surroundings. Fear creeps into his belly as he follows suit. On either side of the road rises a short but pronounced embankment. Dense shrubs crowd dark evergreens at opposite crests. Tactically, it was a bad position to be caught in. Very bad, indeed.

“John.” Sherlock’s voice comes from behind, and when John turns, he knows his friend has already reached the same conclusions. “This is the route you took?”

“Something hit it,” he says, shouts into the radio, demanding a response from Weinberg and Cadogan.

“Or detonated.” Mike says from inside the cab, eyes wide and serious.

“But you came in this way yesterday? _John!_ You came this way without interference yesterday morning. So why now?” His brows furrow. Lines crinkles at his mouth and eyes. Worry lines, scored day after day for thirteen years.

“Dad,” Jon says, voice clear. John has only a moment to marvel at the calm Sherlock’s sons, children, by all rights, display. They should be panicking. They are children. Why aren’t they afraid? The only plausible answer John Watson can fathom, is that these children have known fear, and known their own minds in the face of it.

Olesson shouts. “Back! Back!” A burst of gunfire screams through the air.

“Not quite so inconspicuous as you’d hoped, then,” Sherlock mutters.

“Nope,” John grunts, throwing his radio inside the cab. “Think you’re right there.”

“I’m always right.”

“You’re really not,” John says. He cocks and adjusts his gun.

Sherlock slams the vehicle door closed on Mike and Jon. “Let us hope so.”

 

* * *

 

John’s soldiers have their guns out by the time she’s seen them: Figures in the trees, distant, and half obscured. Shifting shadows. Many shifting shadows. One moves forward.

A man in a cap and green vest call out: “No moves.” His voice is measured, calm, but there’s an edge to his tone. A threat unspoken. “Step back. Now.” At his back, guns are trained on the two soldiers who’d run ahead of the second car, leaving them frozen in their flight to help their unmoving companions in the overturned, smoking vehicle. “No moves at all.”

The young soldiers watch, wait, sights and eyes on the unknowns.

Through the window Molly spies John. His gun hand steady. “Sir,” he calls out. “I’ll ask you to move along.”

Green Vested man descends the steep knoll of dead leaves with the others. They each carry a large automatic rifle. The guns are so outsized, so militaristic and menacing, they are almost ridiculous. Hysteria giggles in her chest. The tallest, darkest of the three wears a knife on his belt. The other follower is shorter, powerfully built, younger. It’s so stupid. Cliche. To be so close...It all feels like something out of a terrible film.

“No need for those.” The man holds out his arms, as if to placate.

The hammering beat of her heart echoes in Molly’s ears like rain. Lily stares, eyes wide.

John’s voice is stone. “Sir. I’ll ask you to stay back. I am Captain John Watson of the 67th Parallel Patrol. I am on a peacekeeping mission sanctioned by the Northern European Union and the United Nations.”

“‘Keeping the peace’?” Taller laughs, derisive. “Howzat working out?”

“Kept, and I’d like it to stay that way a bit longer, if you don’t mind. Now I asked you nicely once. Not gonna do it again. _Put down your weapons and step away_.”

Molly tightens her grip on Violet. Dread winds a tight, black knot in her stomach.

Green Vest taps the hull. Up close, he’s younger than she imagined. Strong, certainly, beard neatly clipped, but with a gut sinking his belt and a sallow, waxy sheen to his skin. “These are nice.” He runs his hand over the side of the vehicle. She moves to pull Lily away. Too late. The vested man spies her through the glass, stops. “Hi-yo, pretty miss. Hello,” he cajoles, voice soft. Sing-songs.

“Mummy? We have to go,” Violet whines, burrowing her head into Molly’s shoulder.

“Mummy.” Pale breath formed on the exterior of the glass. A tap. Two taps. Below his cap, she could not make out his eyes. Only a flash of white teeth, a pink slide of tongue.

The younger man juts his chin at John. “You English?

John inches forward. “Once upon a time. Been a while. Naturalized Norwegian now,” John answers, “So unless you’ve a problem with Vikings, herring or Ibsen plays, I suggest you take this elsewhere.”

The man whistles. Peers into the third car.

“Swear to God, if you _don’t stay back_ ,” John barks.

The man whistles again. More armed figures appear at the edge of the trees. A dozen, closer to two.

 _Oh god oh god_. Every story she's heard of Magpies, gangs of thieves, murderers unmoved by law and compelled to disorder, suddenly rush to mind. They are stories like Middle Age cautionary tales for children, only true and terrible and _real_.

Green Vest unholsters a gun of his own. “Guns down. Now.”

Neither John nor his men move.

The man steps in close, says lowly in that disconcerting calm: “You’ll do it, Captain. Before this gets out of hand.”

_No, no, no._

John’s shoulders slump, mouth tight. He nods to the men, who lower their guns. Green Vest man orders them out of the cars. Heart pounding, hands shaking she undoes her seat belt, then the girls.

“I don’t want to,” Violet whispers, holding her arm. Lily won’t budge, so she snatches the shoelaces from her hands, shoves it in her pocket. Prompts her forward.

“Shh, shh, listen to the major please.” Molly makes eye contact with the kind young soldier, whose mouth is a hard, thin line. He lifts Lily, then Violet to the ground behind her. Mike and Jon stand against their vehicle. She recognizes the look in Sherlock’s eyes as he scans the treeline, counting the strangers whose ridiculous weapons are trained on his family.

“Why–” He walks a path before Molly and the girls. “–would the Norwegian military–” he says this with a pointed, disbelieving look back at his companion. “-send an armed convoy out here?” He paces back and forth. “What for?”

John says nothing.

He stands before Sherlock. “This your family?”

Sherlock says nothing. Only stares. Watches.

“I think so,” the man says, hand on his gun. He looks Mike over, Jon, the girls. He meets Molly’s unflinching gaze, and considers her with curiosity. _Who are you?_ he seems to ask. _Why would anyone bother with you?_

“Who,” the man says to Sherlock again, leaning very close. “Are? You?”

Sherlock blinks in distasteful. Makes a show of wiping his spittle from his cheek. “I could ask the same.”

The man shrugs, holds his hands out to the side, gestures to those who are waiting on the ridge about. “You’re passing through our territory, no announcements, no PA escorts. Can’t take any chances in these times. May well be in the business of helping people, those who deserve it, but I’ve not lived as long as I have by leaving anything to chance.”

“Mm, no.”

Green Vest spits in the dirt. Repeats, “No?”

 _Oh God_. Molly can hardly bear to watch. She wills him to keep quiet even as she knows what’s coming. _Please don’t_. A horrible moment stretches out as she waits for him to launch into it, to determine how some button or zip or the way these men holds his weapon betray some horrible _horribleness_. And that will be it.

Except he says none of those things. There’s a flicker of something in his face before Sherlock clenches his fist, letting it rest on Jonathan’s shoulder. He says nothing at all for a long silent moment. “Only that your guns and the knife,” he nods to Taller, “on his belt appear to have seen a fair amount of use. That. plus the many larger ones in the hands of your company hardly suggest you’re in the habit _helping_ people now, do they?”

The man sizes him up. “People to protect. I’m sure you can relate. Can’t leave our own to the wolves, can we?”

“There are no wolves in Scotland,” Mike interjects, darkly. “Though maybe you mean metaphorically.” Molly’s struck with a sudden bolt of pride that is quickly overcome by fear and anger at him. He was too much. Too, too much. Too old for his age, too worried for his own good. Sherlock tosses a brief glare down in his direction.

The man looks Sherlock in the eye, glances at Mike. Jonathan. The soldiers. His gaze flicks up to Sherlock again. He sticks his tongue in his cheek a moment. Turns and spits. “Him, and them.” He flicks a finger, calmly directs his companions with a nod to the soldiers. “The older one, too, unfortunately. Get these ready and cleared”

It doesn’t register. She doesn’t understand. Not until the figures at the treeline drop down with their awful, giant guns. Not until Mike is wrenched away from his brother and shoved in line behind one of John’s men, whose hands are quickly bound. Black fear screams out. She steps forward without thinking, her mouth open in a silent _O_ of horror.

“Wait!” She’s yanked painfully back. “No! Sher–” Hands on her mouth and holding her arms.

 _Mike!_ She tries to shout, but is muffled. She wrenches against her obstructors, twisting, _fighting_ – “Sherlo–!”

Lily screams. Molly struggles, someone covers her eyes as she kicks and shoves. John’s shouting and there’s a sound like fists meeting their mark and a thud of body against cold, flat metal. She’s wrenched backward. A sharp, deep pain strikes hard against her temple.

And then there is no sound at all.

 

* * *

 

Time becomes strange for John Watson in the moments after his hands are bound by black ties behind his head. Seconds pass as hours, as micro-moments, when a thousand possible outcomes could spiral out, and do not. Shouting from the road echoes off the trees. Gunshots haunt their footsteps. His mouth is dry and thoughts flying.

Above a falling gully that slopes to a dank and fallow streambed, they pause. The cold ground bites John Watson’s knees. Beside him, the nozzle of a gun is placed against the back of Stephen Bainbridge’s head.

“I’m sorry, sir.” Bainbridge says to him without moving. His eyes look forward. “I’m sorry. We let you down.”

“Shut up,” one of their captors snarks.

Stephen Bainbridge doesn’t move. He does not shake. He does not plead for his life. John Watson’s mind is racing as fast as his heart. At his side, Sherlock’s fingers clench and release. His jaw ticks. He thinks at his best friend: _If those legendary reflexes or quick thinking exist, now would be a good time to demonstrate!_

The gun cocks. “You should have—”

A bullet rips through hair and bone and brain.

Blood sprays the grass.

Thoughts end.

A body falls to the ground.

Stephen Bainbridge goes limp with relief, shocked by survival. “Oh fuck,” he exhales, gulping for breath to calm his racing heart. A worse-for-the-wear Brendan Cadogan undoes his bindings, hauls Bainbridge to his feet. There’s blood across his temple and cheek. Behind him, Sergeants Zikovic and Lee lower their weapons. They are equally battered, and Lee limps, his face contorted in pain.

“Christ,” John shakes with relief.

“Lucky the gas line didn’t blow. The flip stunned me, knocked me out a minute. Came to and saw about five, maybe six of them taking off in LR2 and LR3. Back the way were coming from.”

“Korba?” John asks, wincing. “Weinberg?”

Cadogan shakes his head.

Zikovic unclips Sherlock’s bindings. “Eight minutes?” his friend seethes. “It took you _eight_ minutes to intercede?” His face is livid as he snatches the knife from him and undoes Mike’s ties.

John starts. “You knew they were there?”

“Behind. Sixty, seventy yards back. South.” He bends, looking at the dead man’s clothing.

“Downwind,” Mike says. He cuts the remaining soldiers bindings. “Thought it was more of _them_ for a bit. But they’d a joined in, right? If it was the same group. There’s more of us, even if we’re unarmed. You’d want to keep your advantage to be clear. Make sure we knew we were outmanned. Not try anything.”

“How did their party manage to overlook the three of you?” “Sherlock asks. Mike is at his arm, eyes searching.

Lt. Cadogan look over his shoulder. “We had some help.”

 

* * *

 

Gentle fingers brush her temple. She blinks, wincing at the brightness. “Oh, ah,” she groans. She comes awake. The side of her head aches. Her ears are filled with sound of tearful hiccups.

“Mum,” Jon whispers. “Mum. Mum?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” she replies, feeling the shifting pushy pull of nausea.

“ _Mummy_ ,” Lily wails.

“Careful!” Jon says to his sister. He helps Molly sit up, crouching at her side.

Dim light falls in through rafters. A line of cots fills one wall, half the other. “Where are we? Where did we go?”

“Mummy, you’re hurt,” Violet says, horrified. She touches her own small face in the spot Molly feels a hot and painful throb. Broken skin and a gash that has already swollen up. .

Jon shakes his head. “Dunno. They stole the two army cars we was in. We came back down the road but one of ‘em held my head was against the seat. I think it was a few miles based on how long it took, but I dunno how fast we drove, and I couldn’t see where they brought us.” His voice shakes.

Molly kisses his forehead. “It’s okay. Good work. You’re so observant. It was clever to try and measure,” she says, forcing praise.

Violet’s voice is a shaky whisper. “They put Daddy and John Watson in the woods with the soldiers. Mike, too.”

“Why did they take Mike to the woods?” Lily cries. Her eyes are red and teary, her nose dripping. “He’s not even a _grownup_.”

Molly opens her mouth, holds her head to the side. She can’t breathe. She’s going to be sick. _Oh, God. Sherlock. Mike. Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead._

Lily continues to wail. “Where are they going? Why didn’t they come with us here? They’ll be cold when it gets dark and won’t know where to go–”

Her head spins. Light falls through large, high glass windows; still daylight, so not a great deal of time has passed. Concrete floor. Dripping pipes.

“I want to go _home_ ,” Lily pleads.

“How long?” Molly manages.

Jon swallows. “More than an hour. Maybe two?”

“I want to go home!” Lily wails louder. “My shoe fell off!”

“Shh, please,” Molly says.

“But I–!”

“ _Shut up!_ ” Jon attacks with uncharacteristic resentment.

Lily’s brows fly together in anger. Lashing out, she leans up and shoves his shoulder, toppling him backward. “ _You shut up, Jonathan!_ ” She throws herself into Molly’s arms and sobs. “I want to go home! I don’t want to go to live in the stupid greenhouses. Please, please, pleaseeeee, Mummy. Can we please just _go_? Newton will be hungry and Nikola Tesla and Madame Curie and Maxwell—They’re scared! They’re so, _so_ scared!” She sobs, completely beside herself. Her small red face is tacky with dirt and dust and tears. Violet sniffles into her knees, her hair half-fallen from its braid in a tangly curtain. Jon’s wide green eyes are huge with unspoken emotions.

Her children’s terror is enough to make Molly swallow her own. Tipping her chin up as she gestures to the windows, she asks Jon, “Can you see where we are? Out that window?”

“Yes.” He leaps to his feet, grateful for the task. He stands on a bed; can’t get high enough. He scampers down the wall, trying to manipulate a pile of mouldering pallets into a climbable structure.

“Listen to me,” Molly says softly to Lily, righting her. She smoothes her girl’s wild hair and uses the worn flannel of her shirtsleeve to swipe at tears. “What is it I always say when you hide in the cellar?”

“I don’t care!” Lily howls.

“God. Lily, please.” Molly sighs.

Violet peeks her head up. “We have to be very brave.”

She nods. “The bravest girls there ever were. Be brave. Stay calm. And think very hard so we can find a way to get out of here.”

“Is it like a puzzle?” Lily asks.

“It’s like a puzzle, yes. And think how proud your–” Her voice catches. “How proud _I_ will be when–”

The door lock _clangs_. Is thrown open. Molly tenses, tucking the girls in close. Jonathan freezes.

A middle-aged woman enters. She smiles brightly at Molly. “I’m sorry for the trouble. If you’ll come with me, we can get your sorted. Just you, for now. The little ones will be alright here.”

Molly scowls. Makes no moves. “I’m not leaving my children,” she says, lowly.

“You can come with me, or with several of my stronger companions. They’ll not be so accommodating, dear. I’ll let the choice be yours.” She smiles her sickly smile, as if having just suggested options for brunch instead of the threat of pain and violence.

 

* * *

 

The mud is deep. Once back on the road, their assailants path is not difficult to locate. He’s never been more grateful for Scotland’s rain-choked climate in all his life. Sherlock’s jaw tenses. This. This is what had been happening, playing out across the countryside. Not only magpies—bands of violent thugs, stealing what they wanted and terrorizing whomever they came across—this was...organization. A system with an authority and small but successfully armed force. He turns to the edge of the wood, where Mike is considering the long-range sight of a Remington .338. There is little to no time on their side, but John, his team, the others—they are preparing their plans, debating details. And this is a conversation only he can have. 

Mike gestures to the ground. “It rained last night.”

“It did.”

Mike tips his chin back, through the trees, where the barest view of the muddy track they've come down is visible. “There will be a trail. Tire tracks.”

“There will be.”

“I’m good with tracking even without the rain, so it shouldn’t be difficult at all–”

Sherlock shakes his head. “No.”

Mike looks up sharply. His jaw cuts a hard line. “I’m coming. I’m helping.”

“No.” Sherlock holds firm.

Confusion and frustration cross the boy’s features. Anger. “I _am_. I have to.”

“Mike–”

“I always help you!” Mike exclaims, agitated. “Always! Every time. I have to come. I have to help.”

“Mycroft,” Sherlock says. “You are my _son_.”

The night they made it across the cordon, Mike was quiet. He slept in his mother’s arms, making nothing so loud as a squawk of protest, nothing so much as a sleepy yawn. All of six weeks old, and already attuned into the high stakes, the many perils, of his difficult and unlikely existence.

“I have to,” Mike says, softer. “What if you _don’t_ —?”

He breaks off, unwilling to speak the possibility, refusing to posit such a turn of events.

He licks his lips. “Your uncle. Mary Watson. They’ll take care–”

Mike turns away. His mouth trembles.

Sherlock tries again, reaching out to rest his hands on his son's shoulders. “Last night, you presented me with all the reasons why we had to leave with John. Why it would be unforgivable to remain. You were right. You’ve always been right. You are still right. And I have no choice.”

Mike’s eyebrow raise. His hands shake. “You can’t leave me behind.”

“I,” Sherlock swears, gripping Mike’s shoulders harder, “would _never_ leave you. Ever. But I cannot bring you into a fight, especially not one where I have little to no means of anticipating the outcome. Not like this.” He tries his hand at humor. “Besides. Molly would murder me on the spot.”

Mike stares into the middle distance, eyes out of focus. “You’re not even married. Not really.”

Sherlock shrugs, not really understanding his point. “Details.”

His first child, the one who has never had the luxury of being one, looks up. “Come back.” Mike says. Orders. Pleads. His eyes shine. “You have to come back.”

Sherlock Holmes has learned not to make make promises he cannot keep. He embraces his son. He lets go. He does not look back and see the furious trail of tears on Mike’s face as he is taken away in the company of several of John’s men to the docks and a small boat which will leave, with or without the rescue party, at sunset. He cannot. It would break his heart.

Before he goes, he shrugs out of his coat, wraps it around Mike's shoulders and whispers to his son, “I will do everything I can.”

He makes no promises. Only vows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments are appreciated.


	6. Heroics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _How many times have you done this?_ Molly Hooper asks, and wonders who she is asking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry FUUUUUUUCKKKKK I’m sorry. 
> 
> Sorry about the delay. I mean it. I moved around the world, started a New Job where I have to be a real grownup sometimes (ugh! the worst!) and was caught in the midst of a terrorist attack. So, you know, had some stuff going on. 
> 
> Huge thanks to all the people who had a hand in shaping this. This is dedicated to everyone who played a role: **[othrway](http://othrway.tumblr.com/), [Amalia_Kensington](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington), [theemptyquarto](http://theemptyquarto.tumblr.com/), [Emma_Lynch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Emma_Lynch/pseuds/Emma_Lynch)** , and anyone else I've missed. This fandom means a lot to me, and in reality, very little of that has to do with the characters (though we all know how great they are). It's 99% because of the kind, generous, inspiring, dedicated, creative and genuinely lovely people who are part of it as well. Applause to all of you for your kind words, kudos and support. You make this even more worthwhile.

* * *

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

—Primo Levi, _If This Is a Man_

* * *

 

Once, in the dim, desperate scramble after London, in some half-dead and burned out suburban estate, Molly Hooper came across the bodies of a young couple. They’d been dead for some time—a few weeks, maybe a month. Elements and scavengers had done their work, but their position had been mostly undisturbed. They lay face to face, skull to skull; their arms stretched out, reaching for one another.

She wondered if they died that way. If, before the bones of their clasped hands collapsed, as tissue died, mouldered, and fell away, if the man and the woman had held on to one another until the end.

She wondered who died first.

She wondered what wondering that meant.

“At least you did,” Molly whispered, to herself, and to no one.

“What did you mean, earlier?’” Sherlock asked her much later. His eyes were dark in the low light, strange and fathomless, like black water.

A chill went up her spine. “What?” she asked, distracted by the cold, adjusting the blanket around her shoulders.

“‘At least you did,’” he repeated.

“Oh.” The grief and sadness she’d felt when faced with the dead lovers’ devotion returning to her. “I was just thinking.” She puffed out a breath of damp air, avoiding his face. “They died with someone they loved.” _Who loved them back_ , she did not say.

He was silent. Wind rattled in the branches.

“I know you care, Sherlock,” she said softly, clearly. She did not look at him. “But I’m not a fool. I think I am–” She paused, reconsidered her words. “I think that _this_ is something you do for lack of other options.”

Molly stood, holding her blanket protectively close. She looked down at him. The firelight threw bright flashes up, drawing out the shadows below his eyes, the hollows in his face.

The next morning she’d woken to flower petals scattered around the cold ground, and a small bunch tied off with a thin piece of pale green ribbon beside her head. He gave her weak tea, his demeanor reserved, like a child who had been rebuked. She thanked him. When he met her gaze finally, she offered him a smile. He leaned in then and kissed her. Just once, awkward, but sweet. Not like at the height of their weeks-old passion, when he was starved for sensation and touch and a wealth of neurochemical needs. It was...a gesture. An affection.

Without a word, he took single pale pink flower from her bundle, petals slightly browned and torn on one side, and stuck it into her hair where it was pulled back behind her ear. “Do not forget, Molly Hooper,” he said, kneeling before her. “Above all else, I chose _you_.”

_You and me._

Once upon the end of the world, Sherlock Holmes had given her flowers, and a stranger thing had never happened in all her life.

 

* * *

 

Memories shift like smoke. Molly studies her strange surroundings. The room where she’s been escorted is a concrete and stone storehouse, darker than the bunk room she’d woken with Jon and the girls. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling. Behind a locked metal screen partitioning the two sides, the opposite side is near-to filled with bags of grain, multi-gallon drums of oil, stack upon stack of boxes bearing unknown contents. Upon on everything—even the blanket on the floor, the bucket in the corner—everything in sight bears the alphanumeric combinations stamped by Glasgow manufacturing plants on the commodities they have, for years, distributed across the border-patrolled areas of Independent Scotland. Goods that belong to the ISPA. Or should.

From what she had seen through a series of windows when she’d been taken from the bunkhouse a half-hour or so before, patrol cars the like of which the PA had always used were parked in hap-hazard lines between a series of low buildings and greenhouses. Beyond them lay a field, dusty with frost. Low hills. Woods. An unremarkable property overall. But large. And silent. There seemed no one at work. Odd, even for autumn. Very few people present at all. The quiet unsettles her. Sitting where she is on the cold concrete, she worries the heel of her palm into her hip, massages an old ache.

The door swings open. The older woman returns, her steel-gray hair bound back atop her head. Her sharp, blue eyes flick over Molly. She seats herself at a central table, reaches into her sweater pocket to retrieve a shiny apple. “Hungry?” the woman asks.

Molly does not move from her place on the floor. She holds her hands tightly around her middle, gripping her elbows—a posture that makes her feel solid and strong. “What do you want?” She manages the words coolly enough, forcing her voice, throat aching with suppressed fear and rage and grief, to hold without breaking.

“Oh.” The woman smiles tenderly, grandmotherly, even. “I’m sorry for your scare, earlier. They’re good men. Doing good work, I promise you that.” She sits at the table, meeting Molly’s uncertain look with steadiness. “You’re not to worry,” she nods.

Something of her cloying calm puts Molly on edge. She would worry less if she were not being _instructed_ to worry less. “Who are you?” she bites out slowly.

“My name is Magda.” The woman raises the apple in offering. Molly holds her tongue against her cheek, holding her look with a glare. The name rolls off her. She does not want to know this person, not even her name.

“Suit yourself.” She settles back in her chair. “What’s yours, dear?”

 _A lie? Not worth it _.__ “Molly."

“Molly,” the woman nods, considers her apple, turning it over, over, over in her hand. She takes out a pocket knife, cuts off a rounded slice and pops it in her mouth. “I think you, dearie, must be one important young lady.” Her jaw roils, round and bulging.

Young lady. The condescension is oddly nuanced. Layered with judgement, but something akin to respect, too. Which was probably why she is being questioned without a gun to her head. “Why do you assume me?” Molly replies. “We– I was with my husband. Before.”

The woman tips her shoulders up, unaffected. “Oh, could be. Shame if that’s the case, but–” She smiles. Her teeth are very white. “Better safe than sorry. You can understand.”

She slips the blade beneath the skin of the apple, peels it back. “So, Molly luv, where did you get yourself an armed escort?” The woman’s eyes flick up as she skins the apple, bit bit bit. “You’ll bear in mind that I don’t like liars.”

The red skin comes loose from pale, pulpy flesh. Molly feels faintly ill.

“People are sick,” she finds herself saying. The broadcasts on BBC Scotland not two days ago flicker to mind across the distance of close but eventful time. “They think I can help,” she lies.

“Why?”

The best lies are mostly truths, Sherlock always told her. “I was a doctor, before. In London. I taught at Bart’s. Smithfield. I worked with diseases.” Sometimes.

“They told me you’re a doctor.”

“What?”

Somewhere, beyond the high windows, boots echo on the cold ground, making rasping sounds against the gravel. “How were they were able to find you?” the woman inquires, moving on.

Molly’s hands slide to the floor.

Thoughts ravel, wind, whirl. Boots and guns and boxes upon boxes upon boxes of ISPA goods that have been missing from dwindling shipments over the last weeks.

“I don’t know,” Molly says, her voice thin.

Trucks moving north. Sanjay’s body laid out on the floor of their clinic. Her thoughts spring fully-formed, but untethered.

The sweet voice again, with a harder edge. “Where were they taking you?”

Doctors. “I don’t know.” _They need doctors. They need doctors, and Sanjay refused or fought back. And they killed him._

The skin of the apple falls to the ground at the woman’s feet, a curl of red and green. Molly scrambles to connect the disparate pieces, unable to tear her eyes from the thin, pebbled skin, looping around itself like a snake. “Where are my children? Who are you?”

The woman’s eyes go hard. “Where are they from, Molly?”

Missing girls and the PA failures. Torness. Military guns in psychotic hands. She reaches for an answer, trying to think, to stall. She licks her lips, blinks, scouring her mind for a coherent thought. “North. Near the Arctic, they said.”

The woman makes a sound in her throat. Interesting, her eyebrows indicate. She cuts another sliver of apple as she looks off into the corner, thinking. “We’ve been needing a doctor a while now.”

And all at once, the pieces, the individual threads that Sherlock has puzzled at for weeks now, they all come together at once. The delays in shipments, the silence that has answered her requests...

“It’s gone, isn’t it?” Molly hears herself say through a fog of disbelief. “The Provisional Authority. They’ve given up. Just...stopped?”

The woman turns an interested, appraising look on her. She appears both surprised and amused at Molly’s reasoning. “Yes.”

Molly shakes her head, unable to reconcile such a thing. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” she repeats, somehow, amid the shock, angered at the notion. For being so difficult to believe and for having the audacity to make sense. “For years, they’ve—How can they just be gone?” She feels out of breath.

The woman waves a hand, dismissive. “They were in over their heads years ago. Failing in small ways everywhere, then not so small. Nowhere to grow, few options for trade. And how’d they respond? By letting sick, godless illegals come in by the boatful to take what little we have? It’s no great loss.” The edge of her mouth lifts, voice full of certain and ironic cheer.

Shock more than self-restraint keeps Molly from reacting. “So you took whatever was left? All their supplies and equipment.” All the missing medicines. The paltry scraps of oats and salt and flour. “You’re scavengers. Magpies.”

The woman pockets her knife. “The last winters have been bad. Ones to come will be worse, sure. A lot of things will be worse.”

Molly struggles to keep her face passive. Despite the woman’s words of agreement, there is something about this doesn’t add up. Resources like food and medicine are a form of power not easily managed, or easily replaced. And even if this is some semi-organized group, they’d have been hard-pressed to take on the likes of the ISPA.

She frowns in her confusion. “But...Why would they just hand off control? That doesn’t make sense.” She looks at the woman sidelong, measuring her response. “You’d have needed to exchange something for them.”

“Exchanges were made. Deals. Communities need support. Need lifeblood. Young people, with strong hands and able bodies.”

Molly stares in disbelief.

“Life, my dear,” says the gray haired woman with the very white teeth. “Is the only currency left that matters.” She holds Molly’s gaze. “As a mother, I think you’ll agree with me on that.”

Molly ventures, slowly, struggling, “Those girls. You...You what? Bartered them? People. Actual people. For petrol and for-for-for fucking _guns_?”

The woman scowls. “Watch your mouth, dear. I dislike cursing almost as much as I dislike lies. You misunderstand. We take people in. Lost, misguided, hopeless people. Give them _life_. Homes, family. _Reasons to live_.” She gestures off with one hand. “Better than what’s waiting for them in most places. And if they don’t want what’s given, if they can’t be grateful for mercy, for kindness…” She shakes her head, impatient as she is intolerant.

Molly cannot reconcile it. Someone would have spoken up. Argued. “People wouldn’t have just _let that happen_!”

“Didn’t meet many objectors,” the woman said. The implication speaks for itself.

There had not been any. Or, Molly realizes, at least not anyone who was _able_ to object. She stares in horror, unable to fathom the twisting, sickening rationalizations. The insanity. “Where are my children.” It is not a question.

The older woman rises to her feet. “My advice would be to rest. You’ll need it. There will be a lot to do soon, once we’re ready. Tomorrow we’ll be heading out.”

“What?” Heart rate spiking with panic, she sits up quickly. “Where? Why?”

The woman raises her soft, lilting voice to recite: “‘He brought them out of darkness, the utter darkness, and broke away their chains.’”

She looks out the window, and the light makes her hair seem truly white. The woman tips her head, sighs. “Of all the terrible things you see, I never expected this. Sickness. Desolation. Seas rising. Once that plant on the coast goes, the soil will be poisoned. The water. Animals. Can’t grow. Can’t build. Can’t live. No,” she shakes her head, tuts again. “We won’t be staying here.”

Her eyes are calm, are clear. “And you’ll be coming, dearie, and you’ll be helping.”

She half turns, and the light throws hard shadows across her face. “Or you won’t be seeing those wee girls nor that fine boy of yours again.”

 

* * *

 

They wait.

And wait.

And _wait_.

Jon sits in edgy, twitchy silence, glancing between the door, the wall, the bed, the girls. They curl together on one of the long cots, whiny and snotty and teary. Occasionally Lily will wail loudly, only for Violet to give her a funny look, then Lily will quiet, snuffling quietly into her sister’s arm. Violet pats her head, hums an old song. “N’body knows you the ways I do, n’body loves you the way I do,” she sing-songs.

He’s unnerved by the role-reversal: normally Violet is the one to get all anxious and edge-y. Instead she’s calming Lily into a sulky, fretful quiet. (Mike told him, once, how people used to think twins had some strange sixth sense about each other. That they didn’t always need words or sounds or voices to communicate. Jon always thought it was stupid to think it was only twins could do that when their parents have always been able to.)

Jon _thunks_ his head against the stone. He wishes he knew what to do. That he was cleverer, like Mike. _He’d_ have them out of here in a heartbeat.

He’s drifted into a half-daydream of his stupid, heroic brother finding some ridiculous way to engineer their dramatic escape when the door cracks open. Jon lifts his head, hoping for a glimpse of Mum or Dad or John Watson or any familiar face at all. His spirits are dashed when another unfamiliar woman enters, a pitcher of water and some bread in hand.

“I’m to have you drink something, eat a bit,” she says.

“We don’t _need_ anything,” Jon says, glaring.

The woman snorts. “Yeah. Trust me: That tune’ll change.”

She holds out a cup.

She’s not old enough to be a _woman_ woman, not really. She has thick, curly brown hair pulled back, and skin that is tanned and freckled. She doesn’t look old, but carries herself with an air about her. It makes him think of the clique-y upper school girls at the last summer fair, acting like they were something else than they were, more mature and savvy-like, which just made them seem silly. And sort of intimidating.

If Mike were here, Jon knows, he’d be able to figure out things from the look of her. Only he can’t quite manage as fast as his brother, can’t think at the same speed, with reason like lightning. So he swallows his fear and tries for what he _can_ manage—a chat.

Jon takes the cup from her, sees his own reflection looking back, waiting. “What is it, this place?”

She doesn’t respond right away, is quiet for a tick. “A safe place,” the woman says eventually. “Not like out there.”

“You came here?” he asks. “Where from?”

She pours the twins each a cup of water, sets them on the table nearest the cot. “Doesn’t matter. Nowhere. Nothing.”

Her fingers play against the frayed edge of her shirt. The notes in her voice ring different from his mates and teachers.“Your accent is different. You’re not Scottish,” Jon prompts.

She shakes her head, looks down at him. “No. I got through the tunnels a long time ago. Me and my brother.”

He remembers what Mike had said the night before, about the secrets tunnels used to sneak under the border. It was dangerous, and deadly, and people kept at it, because the alternatives were worse. “I’ve heard about them, the tunnels. And boats. Did he come here, too?”

Her mouth becomes a hard line, her eyes low, looking down. Looking back. “He’s dead. Boys his age they hit him with bricks and shovels until he died, and then they took his shoes and his pack and his clothes. They took everything.”

She looks up. Her expression is bracing, angry and resigned and exhausted all at once. “That’s what happens out there. People hurt you and take whatever you got. You think you have nothing, and then, after, you realize how lucky you was.” She looks away, wipes her face on her sleeve. Her eyes flick over on the girls. “They sisters?”

“Yes.”

“Yours?”

He scowls at her interest in Lily and Violet. “Leave them _alone_.”

The girl raises her shoulders, makes a screwed-up, childish face at him. “I just _asked_ fer Chris’sakes.” She leaves the plastic jug of water on the sideboard. Looks back at the girls, curled together on one of the bare beds. “They need anything? You?”

Jon is suspicious. “What could we need from _you_?”

The girl pulls harder at the frayed threads on her shirt. “I got a little girl. Bonny little thing, but she’s always really cold here. They don’t–” Her eyes flick away. “I don’t have a coat for her.” Her hands move quickly, her voice sounds weird. Thick, but strained. “I only see her every other week, so I been worried. I don’t– I mean–”

She scowls, shakes her head, comes to, sets her jaw. She glares down at Jon. “Look, jus’ holler if they want a blanket, right?”

The door opens. The woman with gray hair who had left with Mum enters. She smiles gentle-like. “Alright, Ruth?”

“Yes, Magda,” the girl answers.

“Good girl.”

“Who are you?” Jon asks.

The woman touches the girl’s shoulder, nods. “Striving Samaritans, dearie. We help people who are otherwise hungry and hurting. Those with nowhere else to go. Desperate people, at desperate ends.”

His eyes narrow. “ _We_ didn’t ask for your help. You _kidnapped_ us!”

“You’ll understand one day,” the old woman says. Her voices is high and soft. “When you’ve grown. There are a lot of dangerous people going about. People who see the world very different from you or I.”

Jon looks between Ruth and the woman she called Magda. Ruth holds her shoulders back, keeps her eyes cast down. Her hands clench painfully. Like she’s nervous around the older woman.

Or afraid.

From the cot next to him, Lily sniffles, eyes closed. Jon looks over at the pair of them as Mum’s mantra rings out clear in his mind. _You must be very brave_. He stands up and looks the woman in the eye. “My father says people who dislike others for being different are the worst kind of idiot. That they’re the ones you can always count upon to be the cruelest.”

The woman’s mouth twitches. She reaches out touches his shoulder with great sympathy, smiling her sweet old-lady smile.

Then slaps him hard across the face.

Violet cries out, waking Lily and gasping a breath so fast, it sends her into a violent wracking fit. Jon stumbles backward, recoiling under the force of her blow. He scowls, pretending his eyes aren’t watering and his face doesn’t sting from the touch.

“How nice for us all, then,” the woman says, returning his angry, expression with a glare that burns a cold note of fear into the pit of his stomach, “that your father has _nothing_ to say anymore.”

 

* * *

 

Low buildings, five altogether, clustered to one side of a large field, many acres altogether. Running parallel, below the tree-covered hill they watch from, a paved road runs alongside the fields to encircle the buildings. Of the structures, three are larger: a centralized structure with long wings on either side. All cheaply made, late 1970s, early 1980s; all blandly similar, faded from the drab, pale tan paint to drab, pale gray-brown shingles and concrete beneath.

The parking lot beside it is cracked with age and frost. taken up by several rows of vehicles: trailers, trucks, a minivan. The rusted hulk of a partially-disassembled helicopter bearing the insignia of a television station. He spies the Land Rovers, side by side, near one end of the longest, low building.

Figures move between two of the long, single-ceilinged buildings and rows of trucks. Boxes are being moved. Pallets. This is, Sherlock concludes, a former farming operation turned distribution center. And it is presently being liquidated. It is also a snake pit, very likely tied to the disappearance of vulnerable young women across the surrounding areas.

And his family is somewhere inside.

Sherlock Holmes surveys the estate— _compound_ , it might once have been described by second-rate newsmagazines—noting everything. Behind him, John and his team are discussing.

“...No, if we cut the fencing here, start with that first building, just down there, the long one, where they’ve left the cars,” Azubini is saying.

“Excellent plan,” Sherlock barks.

“I’m glad–”

“An excellent way to get us killed,” he finishes.

John scoffs. The others lapse into a tense, agitated silence.

“We should wait for full dark,” suggests one of the soldiers. _Olesson_ , his uniform reads.

“Not long off now,” _Torvik_ points out, considering the gray sky, the growing gloom of fog. “Would buy us time to survey the grounds, find the best way in.”

“We do not have hours to spare,” is all Sherlock offers on the matter. His eyes flick across the compound, taking in the position of structures, placement of vehicles, the access paths, ditches and roads. “Your boat departs at sunset, after which there is no guarantee we can radio for a return. We are not waiting.”

John steps up to his shoulder, says quietly. “Hey. We’re all with you on this, okay? No one is fighting you on our objective here.”

Wind whips dead leaves. The low fog chokes the trees.

As the marine layer moves, clouds part, giving way. Below the rocky hillside of scrub and scree at the near end of a wide field, tilled clean after the autumn harvest, situated alongside a drainage ditch and rusted-out tractor shell, there, through the moving cloud and falling afternoon light, catches a rare glint of sunlight on glass and iron.

And just like that, Sherlock Holmes knows what to do.

“Relax, John,” he says, “I’ve a plan.”

John Watson, Captain of the 67th, falls precisely back into the shoes of Dr. Watson, erstwhile blogger, flatmate, and partner in crime of a long-ago Consulting Detective. The only one in the world.

“Have at it then,” John asks. His mouth ticks up. “How we getting in?”

“How else?” Sherlock Holmes coolly replies. “Through the front door.”

 

* * *

 

Flat, low-lying drifts of fog are rolling beyond the high glass windows when Jonathan decides he’s tired of waiting. Better to do something and face whatever comes than worry for ages about what _might_ happen. And the bad, locked-up, awful feeling that’s been chewing on his heart since that old witchy crone’s visit...He looks up at the ceiling, wills the awful, _babyish_ pinprick of tears away. Not dead. Can’t. Won’t. _Definitely not dead_ , Jon tells himself. (He almost believes it, too.)

He paces around the door. Struggles with the lock.

“Trees,” says Violet, her voice bitty, her head resting on sleeping Lily’s back. Her coughs sound painful. She heaves a breath, worn-out breath from the exertion.

He shushes her over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. Just rest, okay?” He tries to sound calm and normal and fine, even though he’s very much _not_ calm and here this is super not-normal and nothing at all is even close to fine.

“Up up, like trees,” Violet says. Her eyes lift to the high windows. “Hands find the way, feet do the work.” She rattles and she hacks.

Jon frowns. He looks back over shoulder at Violet. “What’d you say?”

“ _Climb_ ,” she huffed, drawing the word out in gruff irritation. He recognized some of his father’s irritability in her tone.

He rises to his feet, staring up.

For all the time he could remember, the parents insisted they know how to climb the trees in the orchard very quickly. How to hide in branches and move quietly out of view of strangers. Dad taught them camouflage. How to hide, even in sight. Mum always made a game of it. A race, an adventure, even. Mike treated it like a chore—another set of skills to learn, another task to master. He’d found no joy in it, though Jon had sometimes thought it was fun. Other times, he hadn’t.

Above him, the glass windows are a good twelve to fourteen feet from the floor, and all of them shut. Except one. Between that furthest window and the next run a corroded iron pipe. It slips from the ceiling above and along the wall below the window before passing through the far wall to some drainage system beyond their room.

He grins. “Genius, Vee. Stay here.”

“Duh,” she grumbles.

He climbs atop a cot, considering the path up. His hands find iron bolts, his feed grip at cracks in the plaster, at the contouring of concrete. It’s tricky. Slow. But he scrabbles his feet along the pipe and wall, holds onto nails, chips in the stone, exposed bits of rebar. The gritty concrete spikes into his fingers, coats them in grainy dust

Just as he’s gotten his hands on the window ledge and is assessing the likelihood of breaking his face (or worse) in the fall, Violet pipes up.

“Jon?” his littlest little sister asks.

He looks back, strains a bit to see her, adjusts his feet.

She cranes her head up, worries her mouth in the lip-pressy way Mum does. “Careful.”

He smirks for her benefit. _No big deal, kiddo_. “Well, yeah. Obviously.”

And with that, he bends, he tenses— _oh SHIT_ —and hurls himself up and through the open window.

 

* * *

 

The pair of greenhouse workers—a youngish man and middle-aged woman—are easily subdued and restrained by John’s men. Really, if _anyone_ should be on their security...

“Hubris.” Sherlock decides.

“What?” John looks over.

Sherlock elucidates, “Hubris. For such loud and obvious provocateurs, they’ve little to no security of their own. Ergo, hubris.”

“No, I know what it is, just never knew you did.” Jokes aren’t really appropriate given the situation. It’s a callback to so many cases. Despite all that is at stake, there’s an old feeling returning, something that’s become almost vestigial since they went their separate ways that long-ago night in London. He is grateful for this, for however long it lasts.

“What are we looking for?”

Sherlock’s eyes scan the rows of germinating plants, the empty hanging pots. They swing in the dying light, like strange fruit, like hanging heads. He clicks his tongue. He pauses on a series of industrial containers. Caution signs are marked on the outside. “Here we are. Just as the recipe calls for. _Nitrogen_.”

“So,” Private Lessin offers, pointing to the container of potent fertilizer. “Plus that,” he gestures to the watery, siphoned-off petrol they’ve liberated, “Equals boom?”

“More or less,” he answers, and sets about building what amounts to a slapdash fertilizer bomb.

_Boom._

 

* * *

 

Jon hits the ground hard, which is expected, but manages not to break any bones as far as he is aware of, which isn’t.

He rises to his knees slowly, shaking his head. He dabs his mouth. A bit of blood comes off from his lip, but other than that and one throbbing knee, he’s okay. His ears ring with the crush of his heartbeat, which sounds so loud, he feels like someone has _got_ to hear it.

Someone is bound to see him, too. He scans the grounds furiously. No one runs out. No one comes after him.

Looking over his shoulder, keeping an eye out, he follows the line of the building till it comes to an end.

Ahead, a fractured asphalt lot is crowded with the vehicles, many in various stages of disarray. Engine parts, wheels, hubcaps, frames—all manner of components are lay in heaps, row by row. Beyond, boxes, drums, pallets are piled up.

He creeps between the skeletal remains of two lorries, trying to stay out of sight and get a sense of his surroundings. Maybe if he–

A shout breaks the heavy silence.

He ducks behind the big wheel well ahead of him.

At the far end of the lot, several people emerge from a building next to the one he had come from. Three older girls, teenagers, as well as two men, one woman. Two of the girls are dressed nicely, with their hair actually styled up. They move freely, leading the way. The other girl has long, messy blonde hair, undone, she kicks and fights, half-carried, half-dragged between the pair of men.

A gray sticking tape is slashed across her mouth. Her wrists are bound together before her.

If Jon’s heart has been pounding loudly, it booms like an empty drum now. The girl isn’t familiar to him, not at all, but he knows without knowing how, exactly, that something bad is going to happen to her.

Things grown-ups whisper about.

Things Mike implies, and his parents share dark looks and closed-door conversations over. He knows she’s maybe missing from her home, doesn’t want to go where she’s going, and has no choice at all.

Neither does he.

Helplessly, he watches, a big, bulky car pulls up in front of them. The two girls get in. The other girl is _put_ in. The woman takes something from her trouser belt and climbs in beside her. One of the men climbs in the front.

He feels the urge to run after the car, but a cold sort of logic stops him. He is one kid, without any help or even a weapon. And doing so would ruin his chances of getting the girls and his mother out. Jon is powerless, and hates it.

The car goes off, and Jon watches it get smaller and smaller. Sees the dust rise behind the car, feeling that awful, gut-churning, heart-chewing feeling get bigger and meaner until he can’t bear it. His face crumples in a scowl that’s not, and fails to keep himself from crying.

He wipes his eyes on his jacket hood, pulls it up over his head and angrily kicks at the wheel he’s leaning against.

_Oh._

He looks up.

Printed nearly alongside the wheels are two words: Land Rover. A large _2_ is stenciled in black upon the side. One of the army car things that John Watson came in.

He barely has a moment to think before the crunching sounds of footsteps on dead leaves sing out.

He drops to his hands and knees and scrabbles under the cab. Gasoline and manure and mud fill his lungs. Rocks and dirt. Cold.

“-last of it this week. You get the others?”

The trunk opens.

“Yeah,” a voice answers. Male. Gruff. “They’re in the chop. Mostly ready. We’ll do Boarhill and folks there in a few days. Magda’s going soon. Tomorrow, maybe. Whenever she gives the word.”

“What about the new one?”

“Who?”

Voice One sounds mean. “Shithead. Deacon spied these out along the base yesterday. Caught them, and the princess they come to rescue.”

“D’you mean, like, an _actual_ –?”

Angry scoff. “Jesus Christ.”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“No, not an _actual_ princess. Some doctor, I think Noah said. From up near Tay. Magda’s been scouting for someone to take over since the old man went.”

 _Mum!_ Jon’s throat and chest ache from holding his breath so close, so thin, it’s like he’s not breathing at all. Pebbles and dirt press into his palms.They fall silent. Clicky, opening sounds and dense _thunks_ sound from above him.

He stares at a laced up pair of boots not foot from his face. They are old, but they are not as old as the trainers he wears, inherited from Mike, and from nameless others before him. The right toe is colored rust-brown. Jon knows that color. He knows what that color means.

The trunk slams. The boots move along the driver’s side. Jon’s heart rate shoots up. They’re getting ready to turn the car on. Turn the car on, drive away, and when they do, he’ll be run over, or they’ll leave him right there, in the open for anyone—

And then the explosion goes off.

 

* * *

 

From the edge of woods nearer the farm structures, away from the burning greenhouse and sheds Sherlock is watching as the loaders and personnel he’d expected from the loading facilities drawn across the field, away from the buildings. Behind, he hears the rasp of one of the digital walkie talkies. It crackles softly in John’s hand, relaying a message from Olesson and Torvik, who keep lookout from the dark of the hill.

Surrounded by unknowns, and tied up on the cold, damp forest floor, the two greenhouse workers are disoriented and fearful. A hard hook to the man’s face, has left a bleeding cut across the bridge of his nose. He looks nervous. The woman, older, but more defiant, remains stubbornly silent. She says nothing.

“We don’t have time to deal with them,” John decides. “Just leave them.”

“Come on,” Sherlock demands. In the shadows, they will be indistinguishable from the others running toward the rising flames. He nods at their captives.

Lessin moves to draw a line of duct tape across the man’s face. He ducks his head aside, stutters out, “Medic’s bunks.” He spits, looks to Lessin, then John. “I think that’s where Sloan and Ruth took them. That’s who you’re here for, right? The doctor? With the kids?”

“Where is that?” Sherlock demands. “Which building?”

The main winces, struggling to turn. He is not used to being in a position of vulnerability, it would seem. “Behind the main house. Building three. Looks, see? I’m helpful. It’s not personal, mate.”

Lessin tapes the man’s mouth closed without hesitation. “Not gonna hurt you,” he says, punctuating each word with a fresh layer of tape, “But I also don’t care if anyone else does.”

The man howls in protest.

Sherlock needs no more information. He turns to John. “Get the first vehicle you can find with enough petrol to get back to your bar. Bring it to the loading dock.”

“Done.” John hands him a radio. “We’ll tell you when we’re there.”

“As fast as humanly possible.” He turns to Stephen Bainbridge and the one of the stronger-looking soldiers, Azubini. “Bainbridge, you, come with me.”

Dan Mackay steps up. “And me.”

Sherlock nods. “Fine.”

 

* * *

 

In the lengthening shadows, they are three more figures moving across silent grounds. Sherlock takes lead as they approach building three. The doors are locked. Bainbridge nudges him aside. A few blows from the butt of a rifle and it gives.

Azubini is first to bolt through the doors. Before they’ve closed the door behind them, a young woman carrying a large basket brimming with linens ducks appears a connecting hallway. She narrows her eyes, curiously. Then, realizing they are not her own her eyes go wide with fright. She hurls her bundle of bedclothes and bolts for a stairwell. She opens her mouth to scream as they fly after her, but Azubini has uncommon speed. He bolts the distance in the blink of an eye, and has her mouth covered before more than a muffled groan can be heard. “Shh, shh,” he hisses.

Sherlock spares no time for her feelings. “The woman and three children. Where are they?”

She shrinks away from him in fear. Her eyes are bright with tears, flicking between him, Bainbridge, the hand covering her mouth.

Losing patience, he leans closer, “Unlike your companions, _I_ have no intention of hurting you. Unless I am provoked. So I repeat: Where. Are. They?”

The girl’s eyes shift right. She nods her head down the hall. Azubini gives her lead.

Down another short hall, a left leads them to a single door, beyond which, Sherlock recalls from his survey of the building’s exterior, lies a long room of high windows and angled roof. With shaking hands, the girl unlocks the door.

He shoves through, scans the room.

Lily bolts upright from a bed and gasps so dramatically her expression is almost comical. “DADDY!” she exclaims.

He moves instantly to her side, looks them over. “Are you injured? Have you been hurt?” He rips the blankets away from her, checking her over.

Lily burrows her face in his neck, shaking. “The lady hit Jon in face. She’s nice but not really. I don’t like her and I don’t like it here! When can we go _home_?”

“Where is your mother?” he asks, satisfied both she and Violet are unharmed.

Lily sniffs. “They took her away when we got here.” She screeches at the young woman as Azubini restrains her to a wall pipe and covers her mouth with tape. “ _Sahira_!” Lily hisses in Arabic.

Mackay takes a knee, bends beside Violet, stretched out upon a pillow “Will.” His look is concern mixed with urgency. Sherlock nods.

“Do you know where they took your mum? Your brother?” Bainbridge asks.

“No!” Lily cries and cries. “But Jon went out the window, and we weren’t supposed to move.”

“Which makes the both of you complete rubbish at doing what you’re told. Now _hush_.” Sherlock cups her head and kisses it quickly, lifting her up. He hands her off to Bainbridge. “Take her.”

Sherlock rounds the bed to Violet’s side. “Check this floor, then the building opposite,” he says to Mackay. The older man nods, then disappears through the door.

“I want to go with _you_!” Lily squirms in Stephen Bainbridge’s arms.

Violet wracks under the shuddering force of wet, painful coughs. His jaw ticks at the few copper-brown droplets across her pillow, and the milky pink spittle at the corner of her mouth. He touches his hand to her damp brow. Low fever. Dropping his fingers to her pulse, he finds it disconcertingly rapid. He scoops her into his arms. She makes a tiny sound, curls into his shoulder like a kitten.

“Momentarily,” he says to Lily over her sister’s crown. “Not now.”

“But I want to hug you!” Lily protests.

Sherlock rolls his eyes at her lack of listening skills. “Lily! _Quiet_.”

“Veevee,” she cries to Violet, whispering (barely).

“Shh, shh, little missy,” shushes Bainbridge.

Violet’s half-mast eyes are bright and glassy. “Hurts,” she says. She coughs a deeper, harsher rasp than she had the day prior, one that shakes her entire frame. The spittle at the corners of her mouth is milky pink.

A different fear strikes him. “I know it does,” he says, cradling her head to his chest. He counts every breath against his throat, clutches her thin wrist in his own, feeling the thready pulse tap out. The proof of life, the threat to it.

The radio squawks with John’s voice.

He follows Azubini out the door.

 

* * *

 

Molly sits against the stone wall, huddled into herself and thinking. The corners and floor are empty of cracks, of nails, or pins of shards of glass. The walls are solid concrete and cemented stone. The door locked. Window out of reach.

Green Vest, the man who’d stood above them by the road looking like some ridiculous backcountry overlord, with the guns and the sidekicks and absurdist army of shadows at his back. “Magda’s asked you to come.”

Molly holds her chin, unwilling to be cowed. “Why?”

“She’s got her reasons.” He takes her by the arm, wrenches Molly to her feet.

“I won’t help,” Molly hisses back, shaking her head. “You or that insane woman.”

The man’s eyes narrow. The amusement he’d shown at her defiant attitude is gone. “Excuse me?”

Molly sets her jaw, glares him directly in the eye, refusing to be intimidated.

Green vest sneers, shoves her back. _Hard_. She stumbles against the bare concrete wall, leans forward and spits in his face.

He grimaces. Takes pains to wipe the wet glob from his cheek. His jaw tenses with rage. “I do not _appreciate_ your attitude,” he growls.

Fear sings out. Her heart pounds in terror. He leans down over her. Lily’s shoelaces burn a hole in her pocket. She tenses her fingers around the fraying cord.

“I know, I know.” His breath is close, hot and musty-sour, like mouldering bread. “It’s hard at first. We see that a lot. The fighting, it’s instinctive. Confusing. But here’s the thing, love—You won’t speak ill of any of my people. I won’t have it.”

He reaches out and holds her jaw like she’s a wild animal. “You won’t, or else there’ll be punishment. Maybe to you. Or maybe those girls. Hmm? Maybe the boy. Maybe I punish him like his smart-mouth brother. They were brothers, weren’t they? Maybe I take him, line him up against a wall and put a bullet in his head. Maybe I do that, if I hear you talk about Magda that way again.”

Molly stares at him, eyes wide, too terrified to make a sound.

He snaps his other hand. “I can make them all just _disappear_.” He leans in closer. “Little girls are easy to get rid of..”

Black, murderous rage. The sheer _ferocity_ that grips her is overwhelming and involuntary. Automatic. Instantaneous. She screams at the futility, at the world for ending, at John and Mary for leaving, at Sherlock for being gone, at every burden she cannot bear. She screams in all-consuming hatred and anguish and pure, _violent_ frustration.

The man looks at her in livid surprise. A vein in his forehead pulses, such is his fury at her refusal to be cowed or intimidated. He reaches back to—

The explosion rocks the foundation of the building.

It’s so unexpected, so surprising, that for a moment they’re both too taken aback to do anything but stare up in direction the sound had come from.

The man turns away to the window, away from her. Molly does not hesitate. It’s a chance, not great, not even good. But the only one. She loops the string around his neck, pulls back as hard as she can. He wrenches, but her grip is strong, and the combination is enough to knock them both off balance. Her feet fly out from under her. They topple back to the floor.

His weight stuns the air out of her, but she holds on, tightening her grip on the string, begging it to hold. She will die if it does not hold. She knows she will. Her children will die, or worse, they won’t. They will live every nightmare that has kept her from sleep since the first morning she arose with a sinking stomach in a world tipped off-axis. When she wiped sour, vomit-y bile from her mouth with the back of her hand, knowing, _knowing_ , a new and terrible fear had replaced every other danger they had seen in the course of their chaotic exodus from London. It became constant, immutable, that fear, coloring every moment of her life since.

A sob of rage, of grief, of desperation, of a thousand nameless emotions caught between them all, bursts from her throat. The laces cut into her palms. The man struggles, reaching back. He tears at her hair. Scratches at her face. Molly averts her head, heaves with exertion pulling, pulling, _pulling_.

She thinks of the son who slept in a cardboard box for the first year of his life. She thinks of the daughters torn between their boundless curiosity and a fear of the world they inhabit. She has been forced to instill that fear in them. More anger. More grief. She chokes a breath, holding fast, feeling the desperate flailing of the man in the vest. He writhes. Struggles. Something hard cuts into her upper arm, but she does not let go. Her only choice is to hold on.

She thinks of 221B Baker Street and London and her goddaughter’s chubby cheeks thirteen years before. She thinks of everything Sherlock Holmes gave up for her. The small red house in Cambridge where she held him first, where she saw tears fall at his parent’s disappearance—a mystery that had haunted him for years after. She grits her teeth and, aching aching _aching_ , sucks in shallow, quivery breaths of air that do nothing but make her chest burn without relief.

The man gurgles his protest. His face purples, fingers tighten.

Sherlock Holmes, who may well be dead in a shallow grave, beside his son. It’s a mortar shell of a thought, shredding the last of her resolve. She weeps hot tears of fear and fury and love. Mike. Hazel. Her first child and her last, both gone. The stunning, arresting quality of her grief is a symmetrical thing, if not equal.

 _How many times have you done this?_ Molly Hooper asks, and wonders who she is asking.

The man’s grip slackens. The life is leaving him. She knows death in so many ways. Long before she met Sherlock Holmes, she had known it well already. The familiarity has not been lost.

The man has stopped struggling, stopped moving altogether, by the time her vision returns. Tentatively she lets go. Bloodied red lines, sore and raw, are scored into the soft tissue of her palms. Still, the shoelace held. She did not die. Maybe her children will not either.

Overcome, she weakly pushes the dead man away. He slumps, leaden, head lolled to the side. She thinks of Sanjay. Others: a woman in a garden, a smoking schoolhouse, a couple in a housing complex. _Sherlock_. Hot tears pour. Anguish overwhelms. So close. So close, she thinks, so close. To what?

Molly weeps into her bloody hands for has been done. For what _she_ had done, for what she had not done, time and time and again.

A pair of large, rough hands clasp hers.

She starts, looking up, terrified.

“Hey, easy now.” Kind eyes hold hers.

“Dan.” As she exhales a huge breath of relief, she sinks forward, the tension leaving her body, replaced by shock. “What–? Where–?”

“Cavalry’s arrived,” Dan Mackay deadpans.

“Dan,” she tries to say again, but her throat is tight and her relief so _immediate_ , that she can only press her face to his shoulder and if the word sounds more like _Dad_ , neither of them make mention. Neither of them protest.

Her fingers curl against his jacket. She forces herself to breathe. “Okay. Okay.”

He helps her to her feet.

“I should–” she turns, but there is nothing to be done about the body. Nothing but close the door, and go on.

“Come on, Moll,” Dan says, ushering her out. “We’re gonna have company sooner rather than later. Time to go. That fireball your husband started won’t keep them occupied forever.”

Molly reaches for his shoulder, registering his words. “She–Will? He’s–?”

“Yeah, doc,” Dan pauses long enough to give her a genuine smile. “He’s here. Still kicking.”

She braces herself against the wall a moment, so overwhelming is her relief.

Dan’s eyes twinkle.

 _Oh, God. Sherlock Holmes, you and your bloody seventeen and a half lives._ “Mike?”

“As I understand,” Dan says, rounding a corner. “Mike is under the care of some new friends of yours. Or old friends, maybe.”

She has a dozen questions. A hundred. None of which escape in her at the moment because Sherlock is alive and Mike is safe and there are only three things that take shape in her mind and they’re waiting behind a locked door somewhere in this unbearable place, and there is absolutely no way she will be even close to okay until she has collected them, safe from harm.

Shouts from outside. Dan ducks against the wall, pushing her back and away from the line of sight.

“Where did you _come_ from?” Molly asks, wildly confused at the end of her emotional rope.

Shadows blur past the opposite wall.

Dan glances down the corridor, gestures for her to follow. More ISPA gear is stacked in each of the rooms they pass. Storage. A holding facility, then, for whoever or whatever these people considered themselves to be. He explains:

“Yesterday morning I got reports of unknown vehicles driving in from the coast. I figured it was some new patrols. Told you about the boat that capsized the other night. How it was one of many. Given the number lately, I thought the PA maybe gave the go-ahead to use emergency fuel reserves. But when I radioed Glasgow, I got nothing. Dead air. When I heard they’d been coming in from the old air force base, I got thinking. Military types? Must have been some good reason why they didn’t want to inform the local authorities. That says to me, someone wants in and out, quick. That they’re here for some specific reason.”

She shakes her head, disoriented. Her ears ring. Hands shake. “But how did you get _here_?”

“We checked in near your place, following the tracks,” Dan says. “Saw some big, heavy gear had been there. Not us, for sure. All seemed very out of place. Me, Ivan Driscoll and Martin Percy shadowed you this morning when you left. We planned to close off the gates at Leuchars—still got the codes—but, well. We were there. We saw. We stepped in.”

They duck down another corridor, checking the windows to make sure no one sees their shapes. In the distance, across the darkening field, a huge fire spits from the roof of a greenhouse. Shapes and figures skirt the flames, shouting, screaming. Distracted.

Dan signals her to stay low. He frowns at something he sees beyond the glass. Turning back to her, he tips his head down the hallway opposite. “Go. Out that way. Will and that team are at the loading dock. You’re on borrowed time, doc.”

Molly nods. “Thank you,” she says, unbearably, impossibly, grateful.

He squeezes her wrist tenderly above her wrecked and bleeding hands. “My pleasure, Moll. Now _run_.”

 

* * *

 

The explosion across the field stirs the compound into a panic. From beneath the car, Jon recognizes several of the figures who go running toward the fire as the men from the road. There are shouts. Curses. Confusion. A group rushes out of the building he’d come from, more from low bunkers and a large, concrete building attached to a silo. More shouting. They run toward the flames.

If he has a chance, it’s going to be now.

Sneaking out from under the car, he slowly, quietly opens the back of the Land Rover and closes it behind him. In the low light, behind tinted windows, he’s almost invisible. (He hopes.)

A black utility box is cinched to one side of the cab, half-open. The boots who’d been next to him when the explosion went off must have been doing an inventory.

It’s full of a lot of things he doesn’t really recognize. Bits of shiny plastic are scattered across the boot. Tools and bits and bobs, not a bit of which is scraped or scratched or naffy at the edges. Some tape, bits of rope, cans of substances he doesn’t know much about. He pulls back the thick, dusty tarp, pulls open the snaps on a faded black case...

Inside the case sits a tidy row of circular matte-gray devices bearing the same insignia as John Watson and his men wore on their uniforms: the logo of the Arctic Patrol. On each one reads a set of fat, block letters: DETONATOR.

The beginnings of his plan are taking shape when someone opens the door of the car.

And Jon realizes in that moment how perfectly he is trapped.

 

* * *

 

Sherlock is midway through a set of precise instructions on how fast Azubini is to drive when he hears John’s sharp intake of breath. “Molly. Thank god, “ John hisses. He turns.

Relief is not the feeling that goes through him. There is far too much still at risk. But in the instant he sees her–breathless, ashen, wide-eyed–an incomprehensible fear, an unspoken and _unparseable_ possibility, dissipates. _Molly._

She dashes forward, letting the door close behind her, and throws her arms around his neck. A weight, hot, tight, suffocating, lifts. Molly tightens her grip on him.

“Sherlock,” She sighs into his shoulder. Her fingers dig through the fabric of his shirt.

He cups her jaw, tips her face up to his, holding her the way he once held Billy, his human skull: as if awaiting answers to unspoken questions. “You’re injured,” he assesses. He takes her hands in his own, turns them up. His eyes narrow at the fiber lacerations, swelling of extrinsic ligaments. “ _Who hurt you_?” he seethes.

“Enough,” she commands. Her voice is quiet but insistent. There is a grief in her features. Pain and fear.

In the back of the truck, Lily cries out for her mother.

John takes her by the elbow. “You’ve got to go. The four of you should–”

Sherlock glares at John.

Molly’s head whips up at him. “What d’you mean?” She peers around, her expression searching. “Where is Jonathan?”

“Working on it,” Sherlock answers, annoyed at him.

She repeats, more panicked, “Where is he? _Where is Jonathan!_ ”

The half-second of hesitation is all she needs to have her fears confirmed. “Oh God,” she gasps. Molly tries to move past him. Sherlock reaches out, halts her by the shoulders. “Let go!” she protests.

“Take the girls. We’ll be right behind you. I promise,” John says.

Sherlock pulls her toward the car. “I’ll take care of it. Molly, I’ll _find him_.”

Her fingers grip his shoulders. Her voice is low and furious. “We can’t– _They can’t_ -” Her breath catches. She looks up, beseeching.

Two deputies who’d arrived with Dan Mackay run from around the building opposite at a pace. Men Sherlock knows, some. “Fire’s getting bigger, but they’re controlling it,” says the older of the two. Ivan Driscoll: Former civil engineer. Widow. Father of one living child. A man who does not take risks lightly. “They’re gonna notice company soon, Will.”

Sherlock nods. He looks to the soldiers. Zikovic is already at the wheel of a truck with the chipped, faded logo of a local agricultural college. “You check the tank?”

“It’s good. Few gallons. More than we’d need.”

He nods, satisfied. “Get them to the base. Radio the others, have them meet you.”

Molly shakes her head in disbelief, panic stricken. “What happened to Jon? Where is he?”

“Apparently he jumped out a window,” Sherlock replies, all but forcing her to the door of the truck’s cab, wrenching the door with the large black _3_ written across it.

“What? Why would he have–”

“Well he is _my_ son, isn’t he?” Sherlock bites off. “GO. _Now._ ”

“I can’t–” Molly starts to say.

“Mummmyyy!” Lily sobs. She holds out a small hand.

Sherlock presses Molly into the back of the car. She is gray. The drying blood on her skin is soot-black in the shadow. Her shock is significant. Some of the fight has gone out of her at the sound of Lily’s tears. “You find him,” she implores. “You find him and you come back,” she says. “Rule one.”

He nods, soberly. “Rule two,” he answers. “Now _go_.” He taps the cab twice.

The car tears off, away from him, away the flames, into a rapidly falling night.

 

* * *

 

Once the property of the British Air Force, and later, the British Army, Leuchars is positioned on a strip of land at the mouth of the River Eden, where the freshwater estuary spills into the North Sea. Given the time they had traveled from their point of abduction, Molly knows, logically they can be no more than fifteen miles from the base. The journey seems endless. Her stomach flips as they rocket down a broken road in fading light.

They drive and drive, and as one distance shrinks, another grows.

She clutches her daughters–Violet, a warm, slack weight in her lap, feverish, half-conscious; Lily with her tear-stained face tucked against her shoulder–and does what little she can to push away the black, gut-churning fear in her belly. She murmurs into Lily’s hair; nonsense words and sounds she is hardly aware of speaking.

They race through the darkness.

The car slows as one approach a high gate broken chain-linked fence to the flat, cracked asphalt expanse of the former air base, a sense of relief rushes through her. Another part of her is filled with dread.

At waiting. At waiting, and what comes after she has waited.

_At the idea of having to leave._

A light flashes from the boat. It is larger than she would have thought, low and wide, like she remembered ferry ships to be. The soldier whose name is coming up blank in her mind flashes his exterior lights in a sequence as they approach. The tail of the squat, flat-end lowers to the dock’s concrete edge, they drive onward, ushered in by a waving crew members. The car slows to a stop.

“She needs antibiotics,” Molly says, as the soldier moves to help her. She is trying to climb from the cab, trying to move the twins, trying to explain. “They should run a blood test. I don’t know what type she is–”

“Molly,” the soldier says.

 _Bainbridge_ , she suddenly remembers. Stephen Bainbridge, the Bloody Guardsman. Memories of John Watson’s wedding, of murders and blogs and adventures in another life flood her mind. Bainbridge lifts Violet easily from her arms. “She’ll get them,” he says with certainty. “We’ve got her.” There is blood on his face and on his uniform. Dirt and sweat. How far this boy–this _man_ –had come for her family.

 _Thank you,_ she mouths, silenced by gratitude, lingering anxiety, the fear for Jon and Sherlock.

Bainbridge nods, rushing Violet to the arms of a medical officer in a white coat. Molly steps to the ground, helping Lily out.

“Mike!” Lily wails over her shoulder.

Molly spins. Mike skitters through an open hatch onto the deck. His severe, scowling features brighten demonstrably; it changes the whole look of his face when he grins the way he is now. Makes him look more like the boy he is, the boy he should be, and should always have been.

The joy of seeing Mike alive and unharmed is enough to break through all the fear and worry, if only for a moment. She exhales a breath that is half-laugh, half-sob, as much elation as it is sheer relief as he breaks across the deck toward them. The levity in his expression vanishes as Mike falters short steps from her. A shadow crosses his face. She realizes what he is seeing—Lily’s tears, Violet carried off, the blood at her temple and hands, the dirt across her clothing. Most of all, the absence of his brother and father.

It is too much to bear. She pulls him into a fierce embrace.

As his arms and hands wrap around her shoulders, he clings to her like he hasn’t since before Jon was born, when he was so very, very small. “Oh my god,” she says. Tears loosen. “Are you okay?”

He looks so afraid, so vulnerable despite his many walls. She thinks Sherlock must have looked exactly this way as a child. “ You’re okay?” he asks. Lily flails at him, hugging him awkwardly tight. “Are you hurt? Mum?”.

Molly squeezes his shoulders, nods. “I’m alright.”

“I know what they do.” He holds her elbows. She can feel the precise bite of his nails through the worn fabric of her coat. “I _know_. I know they hurt those girls. And– And other people, too. Like Sanjay,” he whispers. “Mum.” He begs for her to be telling the truth. “Please?”

“It’s okay.” She holds her son, back from the dead, just like his father. She smoothes his hair back. “It’s okay,” she says, and prays that her words be true.

 

* * *

 

Jon Hooper starts like he’s seen the devil himself.

Dan Mackay slams the door behind him, glances in the rearview mirror. “Hey, there. Alright now, Jono?”

Jon’s eyes are wide with dear. Dan holds his hands up in protests. “Hey, I’m here to help! Swear to God, I’m here to get you out.” He searches the dash for keys, finds a small metal fob tossed on the dash. Sloppy, but he won’t question. He’s already grateful to have spotted Jon from the hallway window, hiding between rows of scrapped vehicles and cannibalized auto parts. Sometimes fate was cruel; sometimes, less so.

Jon swallows thickly, leaning toward the front as Dan starts the engine. “I’m okay. But my mum and the girls–”

The car jolts to life. Dan shakes his head. “Are with your Dad. Waiting for us.”

Across the field, more figures have broken away from the greenhouse fire. They will have company very soon.

“He’s okay?” Jon wipes at the dust in his eyes, and then some. “What about Mike?”

"Both fine, and it’s time we joined ‘em, yeah?” With that, he turns nudges the car into forward gear, sends them surging forward. They turn sharply around the edge of the building, where he waves pointedly to Will Hooper. He brakes to a halt by their group. John Watson dives into the front with one of the other young men. Another joins Will in the back.

“Dad!” Jon tackles his father across the seat.

Dan floors the Land Rover, across the back field, toward the dirt access road.

Will Hooper clutches at his son’s shoulders. “Where the hell have you been?” He runs a hand through the boy’s messy hair, assessing him over.

“They said you were _dead_ ,” Jon musters, his voice thick. He clings to his father.

A smirk crinkles at the corner of Will's mouth. “I seem to have chronic issues with that,” Will says, glancing over Jon’s brown hair to Captain Watson. He looks back to his son. “Though not terminal. You’re alright?”

Jon nods. They say nothing for a moment. A kind of understanding seemed to pass between them, as if each of them was contemplating an alternate version of events, where their worst fears had come true.

“I climbed out a window,” Jon says.

Will Hooper looks impressed. “I heard.”

“Sorta unnecessary, turns out,” Jon says.

“Well, the idea had merit.”

“Wait,” Jon protests as they drive. He leans forward, pointing in the opposite direction. “They took some girls. I think one of them...She didn’t want to go. I think she’s one of the ones who disappeared. We have to help them.”

“We can’t.”

“Why? We have to. They’re someone’s family!”

“Jon,” his father says. “You can’t always save everyone.”

His fingers twist in the fabric his father’s shirt. He shakes his head in disbelief. “Can’t you try?”

For a moment, by the look that crossed his face, Dan would have sworn that Will Hooper was about nod his agreement, assert that _yes, of course_ something had to be done.

But the moment flickered, passed away. An expression of weary resignation took it’s place. “I’m sorry.”

Jon looks away. He'd started the day a child. He wouldn't be one any longer when sleep found him next.

Captain Watson’s radio hisses. Dan recognizes the voice of Ivan Driscoll.

Behind them, there are shots. The back window takes a hit, shatters without breaking apart.

They duck down. Dan drives faster. In the rearview, he sees flashes of headlights.

Watson speaks to Driscoll, who has commandeered a faded green Jeep. They flash their high beams from the opposite direction. Dan slows to a stop. Martin Percy is behind the wheel. “Best to split up if they’re planning to follow. We’ll head take this road back north, closer to town.”

Dan frowns, hesitant to agree. Percy and Driscoll aren’t young and foolish, but they’re untested against anything more than brawls and bad ends that have already come. Martin Percy recognizes the look on his face train of thought. “We’ll head to the PA station on the river, Dan. Radio we’re coming and get backup.”

He nods, begrudging. “Be careful.”

They peel off. Without tail lights, they vanish down the road almost instantly. Dan does the same.

Minutes later, Torvik and Olesson beep over the radio, appearing at the edge of the road like ghosts from the darkness.

“Will they come after us?” Jon asks.

“Probably,” Will Hooper says, darkly.

“Use these, then,” Jon says, pointing to the far back. “On the road.”

“Boom, boom,” Lessin grins. “Comes by that honestly, don’t he?”

They plant four along the road in rapid succession—enough to cut an impassable trench. They’re a hundred meters down the road when the explosives go, and still the sound shakes him. Recalls the early days. Dan doesn’t like thinking about that time.

“Nice work.” Will Hooper grins and rests a one large hand on his son’s head. “So,” he says over the seatback to Watson. “We’ve been marched to our death, planned and succesfully executed a minor raid, detonated multiples explosive devices, and made–”

“Don’t jinx it, you cock,” John Watson scoffs, focused intent on the road before them.

“–our getaway. How’s it feel? ”

“To hang around with you again? Haven’t had this much stress in years. And that is saying something.”

“He says ‘stress,’” Will says, eyes bright. “He means fun.”

Dan Mackay scoffs. Wipes the sweat from his face. “Think I’m starting to see what they were talking about now.”

 

* * *

 

Bainbridge tells her the moment the car arrives. “Stay with them,” she shouts to Mike before he can protest, then takes off running for the arrival bay.

At the sight of Jon and Sherlock both on the edge of the dock, beside one of the undamaged Land Rovers, Molly nearly collapses under the force of her relief.

“Jonathan,” she nearly sobs, all but bowling him over with the ferocity of her embrace. “Why did you go off like that?” she seethes, holding his small face in her hands.

“I was trying to help you!” he says. Her heart cracks at the emotion in his voice.

“That was not your job!” She is so happy, and so angry, and so _much_.

Jon touches her arm, eyes large. “Mum, you’re hurt,” Jon says.

“It’s fine,” she says, pressing her cheek into his wild hair. Her hands are sore and the cut on her arm is messy, but it is not particularly deep.

“Told you we'd get him,” John Watson says.

“You did,” she says, stricken under the weight of her gratitude for this man. For all he had done. “Can you make sure–With the girls and Mike–” She points ineffectually toward the ship.

He nods, puts a hand on Jon’s shoulder. “C’mon kiddo. Let’s go get that massive brain of yours checked out.”

"I don' have a massive brain," Jon argues.

"Yeah," says John Watson, takes him under his arm. "You do."

She blinks back tears that fracture the lights from the boat in to prisms, rainbows.

“Molly.”

Sherlock is staring at her arm, and the blood on her hands and clothing. The glimmer of an old fear haunts his eyes. Something that’s been there between them for a very long time. She’s seen it in his face enough times to know, this is the closest he gets to his danger nights anymore—when he turns all the anger and frustration he has for all the things he can’t control.

She touches his arm. Strokes the skin of his wrist with her thumb. “It’s okay.”

Knowing him as she does, she expects a cutting remark. A coldness toward her, and rage he directs at himself.

He surprises her by doing neither. Instead he turns to Dan, who stands at the door of the vehicle. To her continued surprised, she realizes he’s been conscientious enough to actually check and remove the few backpacks and duffel bags of personal effects the children had packed into the back of the vehicles so much earlier that day.

“Take the coast,” Sherlock tells him. “Avoid going anywhere south.”

“I still don’t understand how you knew,” Molly wonders aloud, her brow furrows. “When you heard the reports of the cars, how knew to come to _us_.”

Dan glances to the ground. His eyes are bright, and if she’s being honest, she’d says he looks more than a bit pleased with himself. “Oh, well. I just figured if it was anyone around these parts folks come looking for, it’d be Sherlock Holmes.” He tips his head at Sherlock, raises one knowing brow. “Seem to recall he had some big-to-do of brother, got him out of a few jams, if you believed the press back then.”

Her mouth drops. She’s at a loss for words.

Dan winks. “How’s that for deduction?”

“Not bad,” Sherlock admits.

“You _knew_?” Molly says, shocked.

He gives her a reproachful look. “I _did_ read the papers, once upon a time. And the occasional blog.”

It is full dark. A waxing moon hangs low in the sky. “You have to leave,” Molly implores, taking Dan’s arm. As quick as she can, she tells him everything—the reactor, the PA, the border; all the dangers that loom. “You have to tell everyone. Tell them they have to leave. I’m so sorry...”

“Molly,” Sherlock says.

“I will.” He tips his head toward the ship. Not for the first time, Molly wonders how a many who has lost so much, found so few answers, can be a source of such peace. How he can manage such kindness. “Don’t be,” Dan says. “Go on, doc.”

“Dan,” Molly says, a last time. “Thank you.”

Sherlock is at her side. He holds out a hand. “For everything.”

The engines turn over, louder.

Dan takes the hand that is offered in both of his. “Good luck.”

 

* * *

 

“They’re coming after us!?” Lily’s voice—so often loud enough to be obnoxious, silly enough to be absurd—is wild with panic.

“No, Lil. They can’t.” Jon says it to calm her, but from the glance he sends over her shoulder, Molly sees the need for affirmation as well.

“You’ve a very smart brother,” John Watson says, the calm in him like a second miracle. “He’s right. No one is coming after you.”

“But what if they do?” Lily asks, sucking in a wet, weepy breath.

“They can’t,” Mike says, like an authority.

John brushes the long, snarled hair off her face. Sherlock takes her from her brother, envelopes her in his arms, murmuring something in her ear. She wraps her arms around his neck, looks to John. “You promise?” she asks, still weepy.

John nods. “Promise.”

There are showers and meals after John and the ship’s surgeon—a tall, brown-skinned woman with close-cropped hair and a smile so bright as to placate even Lily’s stubborn tears—make cursory exams of them all.

Molly’s arm is stitched, her hands dressed, all while Mike describes having a gun placed to his head. Jon counters with being struck in the face and finding grenades after falling out a window. She is silent and unfocused, and even after the boys and Lily fall into sleep, drained, exhausted by their ordeal, she is hyper-aware of every wall and every door (Deck B, cabin 11, _two down, three down, four…_ ) that stands between them.

Without her realizing when he’d appeared or how long he’d been beside her, Sherlock takes her hand, gently, aware of the bandages, and steers her to the medical bay.

Stretched out and sleeping, Violet is wrapped in his Belstaff and a blanket, curled onto her side. A drip of intravenous antibiotics flows into her arm. She is as sick as she had been the previous year, if not worse. Silent, he guides her to the cot next over to Violet’s, and to his side. He says nothing, but the message he means to convey does not escape her. Already, Violet was being treated. She would get better. They would be okay.

Molly buries her face in the rough fabric of his shirt, dampening it with the tears that are not relief, or fear, or joy, or regret, but some undefinable combination thereof. The result of post-traumatic stress to some laughably exponential order.

Sherlock tucks her head beneath his chin, his grip around her waist. The slide of his fingers against her skin, the curl of his hand in her hair, she knows, express so much of sentiment that words could not, and for thirteen years rule one has always been exactly the same as rule two: Together.

_You and me._

The boat sways, rocks. Under her cheek, Sherlock’s heart thumps a steady, familiar tattoo. The sound recedes into the crashing waves along the hull.

Molly closes her eyes.

Awash in the long light of a golden shore, she sinks into the shallows of a half-remembered dream. A ferris wheel above a bustling boardwalk. Warm salt air. The sounds of music, of laughter, joined by voices of her sons and her daughters.

 

* * *

 

The boat is not a boat. It is more than the leaking, frangible coffins that he had seen washed along the coast for too many years now. _It is a ship._ Made somewhere where ships could still be made, able to withstand a true test of wind and tide and water. He watches the ship in its quiet progress as it moves off the coast. A comet’s tale of chop streaks in its wake.

Dan Mackay is still watching the horizon, listening to the roar and crash of of waves against the dock, the distant calls of sea eagles and gulls when the bullet enters his chest cavity.

The distance it travels is not far. Twenty meters, maybe twenty-five, before it hits him, sent from the barrel of a rifle held by a woman with very white teeth.

It skims parallel to a frost-cracked concrete before it tears through soft flesh, rupturing blood vessels, organ tissue, fibrous muscle, weak bones.

The damage is immediate, immense. Dan Mackay is dead before his skull cracks the cold ground beside the Land Rover.

Molly Hooper’s message dies with him.

 

* * *


	7. Hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A man with silvery hair greets them below in a long room below the heliport deck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Massive thanks to [Amalia_Kensington](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington) and [Emma_Lynch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Emma_Lynch/pseuds/Emma_Lynch), who both put on their editing caps and looked this final chapter over. Any typos left are surely only my fault. 
> 
> At times since I began writing it, I've realized this story ended up more resonant and topical than I ever intended it to be. This isn’t the place for impassioned arguments about human rights vs political economy, so I’m just gonna leave this here: UNHCR.

* * *

“There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself.”  


― Ian McEwan, _Saturday_

* * *

It is early evening, two days later, when the helicopter touches down on a launch pad beside an alpine forest warmed by the luminous glow of hundreds of portal lights and glass windows built into the side of a very long, very high and steep fjord. The shining reflections glimmer and sparkle above the ink-black Norwegian sea. 

A man with silvery hair greets them in a long room below the heliport deck. Despite his casual slacks and button down vest (a far cry from the Helmut Lang and Thierry Mugler cuts that had once been his staples), he has an air of great import. 

Mycroft. 

“Sherlock,” his filial blood says. 

Sherlock Holmes scowls with great and dedicated purpose, approaching his brother with clenched fists. He narrows his eyes. Stepping toward his elder sibling fast, he leans deeply into Mycroft’s personal space.

And smiles. 

The tension dissipates. Mycroft scoffs at being taken in. 

Sherlock straightens, holding out a hand. “Thanks for the lift. You should have come. Would have had you round for tea.” 

“You know me and _legwork_ ,” Mycroft smiles, shaking his hand with all the impression of formality. Some things do not change. “No longer fit for it, I’m afraid. Besides, my best—well, second best—was on the case.” He turns to John, holds out his hand. “Well done, Captain.” 

John shakes it. “Well done, _us_. Team effort, Mycroft.” 

“Indeed it was.” 

They exchange a look of knowing self-satisfaction, as might comrades of wars that been fought and hard won. 

Sherlock wonders at the similarity between such dissimilar men. How steadfast, the bonds of duty. 

“Right,” he says to his brother, as if over a children’s game at Baker Street, awaiting Mrs. Hudson’s tea. “My gratitude for… _wading in_.”

“Yes. Well, anyway. They said there were several in your party?” Mycroft mentions obliquely.

“A few.” Sherlock returns, sly. He clasps his hands behind his back, hearing the precise weight and cadence of familiar footfalls approaching. “Acquisitions, you could say. People you should meet,” he says. 

It could be a trick of the light, but for a moment, it’s entirely possibly his brother’s stoic expression flickers into something like _joy_.

“Oh,” Mycroft replies, attempting to keep his guard up, if only for appearances sake. “And who have we here?” 

The soldiers file past in groups and pairs. They’ve families of their own to return to. “Dr. Hooper. I am…I am glad to see you are well.” 

Molly ignores the outstretched hand and pulls him down into a firm embrace. “Thank you.” 

Sherlock grins at the look of surprise on his brother’s face. Mycroft pats her back awkwardly, but opens his mouth, hesitant, to admit a rare moment of emotion. “I always honor a promise.” 

Molly smiles. “I know.”

Sherlock looks at his sons and nods toward his brother. “Mike Hooper,” his oldest says. “Holmes,” he adds.

Mycroft looks darkly over. “You didn’t.” 

Sherlock sighs dramatically. “Molly’s idea. Try arguing with a woman equipped with the know-how to discretely dismember you, should the inclination strike.”

“How touching,” Mycroft says, and regards his namesake with amusement. 

“One day,” Mike growls, gesturing between Sherlock and himself, “could you just say my name without making a _thing_ of it?” he glares. 

“Probably not.” 

Mike purses his lips, shakes his head as he looks over at the newcomer suspiciously. He jerks his chin. “Who he?” 

Sherlock grins proudly. “Oh, just my brother. End times have been good to you, Mycroft. Sugar stores holding up, I see.”

“You’re Mycroft?” Mike asks, giving him a once-over. 

“Mycroft Holmes the elder, it would seem.” He shakes his nephew’s hand. Turning to Jonathan. “And you are?” 

“Jon. Jonathan,” says the second son of a second son. “Um, these are our sisters.” He twists, indicating to one six-year-old hiding behind his coat. “That’s Lily and this is Violet.” He jostles his other little sister, sitting on his back piggyback style, skeptically considering those around her. 

“Twins?” Mycroft scoffs at him, though utterly charmed. “You don’t do anything by halves, do you?” 

Sherlock shrugs. He bends to lift Violet from her perch. “Have I ever?” 

“Are you the Minister?” Lily asks. 

“Not quite, my dear,” Mycroft admits. 

“Not far off from it though, I’d expect,” Sherlock quips, glancing up. “He is actually your uncle.” 

“Oh. Hi!” She shines a smile. 

“Our uncle,” Violet tries out, her mouth twisting up and to the side. Seems to like it. 

Mycroft leads them down a long white corridor, bounded by rock walls reflecting the last golden light. “We have rooms prepared. Some documentation to work out—that will keep until tomorrow. But I imagine there are a fair few things you’ve been missing.”

They come to a door made of wood and metal, the same form, style, materials as the others they have passed. The alphanumeric pattern breaks, however. 

“Special dispensation,” Mycroft replies. “From the Chancellor herself. A small welcome present, shall we say.” 

For the second time in his life, Sherlock Holmes comes to _221B_ and knows it to be home. “Please extend my thanks to Anthea.” 

Mycroft raises a brow. “Tell her yourself. I expects she’ll have an offer for you soon enough.” He holds out an arm, gestures for his brother to enter. 

The rooms are natural wood and glass and stone. Bright whites and elemental colors. One entire wall is made of translucent glass, floor to ceiling, looking down on a wide atrium. At the bottom are gardens and pools. Above, sky. The glowing reflective surfaces–some clear, some darkened–of other rooms around the closed-in canyon ripple and bend with the organic undulations in the rockface. It is beautiful in its stark, minimalist simplicity. A marriage of human capability and natural order. 

“It’s bright!” Lily remarks.

“Wow,” Jon blinks, amazed.

He is about to reply when without warning, a blonde bolt shoves her way past a pair of obliging guards who trail within distance of Mycroft. 

Molly’s jaw drops. Her bag thumps to the ground. Her fast steps become a run as she launches herself into the arms of Mary Watson. 

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Mary repeats, over and over and over. “So long. It’s been so long. _Finally_ ,” she laugh-sobs. In her bright blue blouse and jet black leggings, she is stark, present, sure. Her hands pull Molly’s face to hers. “You _stupid_ bloody bint,” Mary cries, sniffling, laughing. “I can’t believe you let us go. _Why_ did you let us go without you? I’ve missed you every minute of every day for a hundred years.” 

“ _Mary_ ,” Molly tries to say, but cannot. She shakes against her friend’s shoulder.

Together they tip around and around in a circling embrace. “I missed you so much. Even that brilliant berk.” Mary’s face curves up to him, full of grief, full of joy.

“You know me. Always letting him talk me into things,” Molly sobs. 

Mary pulls back, wipes at her tears. Holds Molly’s face close to her own. “You made it. You really, really made it.” She studies Molly in wonder. “After all this time.” 

Overcome, Molly bites her lip, nods. 

“Oh, God. I didn’t believe it when John messaged. Look at these children!” Mary tackles Mike with a bear hug, mussing his mop of black hair and smacking a kiss to his head, then does the same to Jonathan. “Look at you lot!" She sniffles, faking halfway to composure. "What are you called? When’s your birthdays? I’ve years of embarrassment and utterly shameless spoiling to make up for. I’m sorry, but I’m definitely not. It’s going to be dreadful.” 

Her mouth curls, but her lips tremble as she does. Tears fall from her eye lashes, too fast to be blinked away.

“This is Mary Watson,” Molly explains, wiping at her eyes. “John’s wife, and one of my best friends in the whole world.” Her smile fractures into a teary sob. She turns into Sherlock’s shoulder. Her fingers dig into his bicep. He strokes the skin of her wrist, once, twice.

Jonathan gawps, shocked. Awestruck, as though his heroes have come to life. Though, Sherlock supposes, his heroes have always been real to begin with. 

“Sherlock,” Mary breathes, shocked, relieved, overjoyed. She gazes up at him. “Look what you did.” 

“Had some help,” he smiles, kissing her temple and returning her heartfelt embrace.

Mary’s eyes crinkle, as pleased as they are pained. She shakes her head briskly, turns her eyes downward, drops to a crouch. “And who are you perfect pixies?” 

They glance to their mother. Molly tips her chin, urging the twins on. 

“Lily,” declares Lily. 

“Violet,” Violet says softly, reaching up to hold his hand. 

“Lily, Violet, and…”

“Jonathan.” 

“Jonathan,” she beams. “Are you about ten or so?” 

“Nine.” 

She smiles. “My Will is your age, how about that?” She turns to Mike. “So you’re the oldest, eh–?”

“I am." 

You are. You'll be twelve, then. Ish.” 

He frowns, off-put. “Thirteen." 

Mary laughs. “You definitely aren’t. Well, not unless I missed something with these two.” She winks at Sherlock. Molly cries her laugh again.

Mike's brows knit up. “How–?” The penny drops. “ _Ugh!_ ”

Mary laughs again, a sharp note almost like hysteria, a genuine ring of relief. It is sound with layers of meaning and emotion. 

“You’re back!” As though summoned, two blonde heads appear at the door. A slim, pretty girl in a bob hairstyle beams brightly. Her brother’s crooked grin the mirror of John’s. 

“Bell,” says John, “ Will, c’mere!” He embraces them both. 

“Figured you had to be home when Mum bolted off without explaining.” 

“Isabelle,” Molly exclaims, wondrous. 

“Just Bell,” she says, by way of introduction. Mike stands a little taller, nods tightly. 

“Wow. Hi. I’m, well, I guess, we’re–”

“You’re my godparents,” Bell finishes brightly. She gives Molly a quick though sincere hug. “I know!” She cheekily holds out her hand to him, eyes narrowing in mock severity. “Mr. Holmes.”

Mary’s sense of humor, then. He grins. 

William Scott Watson breezes through the ‘hi, hello,’ cuts straight to the chase. “Wanna see the thermal pools and the shooting range and a coupla other brill spots?”

“Will,” Mary warns. “Give them a minute to get settled, if you please?” 

“I got everyone’s welfare at heart, Mum. Don’t want anyone to be _bored_.” 

Molly cracks into another happy-sad laugh, a cry he has come to know means joy as much as sadness.

“What is this place?” Mike asks. 

Mary holds out a hand. “Let’s show you.”

"Let us," Mycroft agrees. He leads on. They follow.

John’s son and daughter are bright, animated, well-adjusted. They are vivacious, outgoing, but considerate as well, taking care to point out locations of interest, directions to here and there, as their motley group wanders long, arched hallways illuminated with soft lights, blue-white and radiant. 

Will rolls his eyes. “Mum said we should show you where things like the library and classrooms are in this block. Don’t worry. The boring stuff you can just ask a grownup. D’you like animals?” He asks Jon. “The vet school’s just had a tiny penguin brood hatch,” he says, turning to Mike and the girls. “They’re so weird. It’s great!”

Jonathan appears beyond words, he can only nod and grin. 

“C’mon!” 

“I know you’ve had to come a very long way,” Bell says gently to Lily. “That must have been very hard.” 

“Yes. Some people tried to hurt us. It smelled strange and a lady hit Jonathan in the face so he jumped out a window. _And_ we had to leave Newton and Nikola Tesla behind behind.” 

“Was Newton your friend?” Bell inquires. 

“Yes,” Lily sniffs, watery, trembly. “He was my cat.” She slows down, turning against Jonathan’s side, hiding her face. Jon tugs her braid affectionately. She smacks his hand. 

“I’m so sorry,” Bell says. She unclips a small, flowered pin from behind her ear and fastens it above Lily's messy braid. “D’you know what? I think you must be very brave.” 

Lily nods. “Mummy says we have to be.”

“I think she must be very brave, too,” Mary says, above her daughter’s head. 

Brave, Sherlock Holmes knows all too well, cannot begin to describe the strength possessing of Molly Hooper. 

“Well,” Bell holds out her hand. Lily does not hesitate to take it. “Maybe you can tell me about Mr. Newton and after we meet the tiny penguins. Or, I have some films and books and games you might enjoy. Have you ever heard of Harry Potter?” Bell asks, looking over to Violet. 

“Harry?” Violet interjects, looking up with wide eyes, voice anxious with excitement. “You have Harry?!” She taps at Molly’s arm in her uncommonly animated state. Then, quickly, her face scrunches and shoulders pinch. She leans against Molly’s hip, wracked by coughs. After several rounds of intravenous antibiotics, her illness is not nearly as bad as it had been some days prior, though she will need weeks if not more to fully recover. 

John hoists her up and pats her back. “That’s a girl.” She lays her head on his shoulder a moment, heaving deeply. “I love Harry,” she wheezes to him. “He is my _favorite_.” 

“We’ve never been able to find the last few,” Molly explains. 

“Then isn’t today your lucky day, little ducks,” Mary says, running a hand along Violet’s hair, relishing her role as impromptu fairy godmother. “Full medical workups tomorrow morning,” she says to Molly, and catches Sherlock’s eye. Molly’s lip trembles as she looks away, beside herself with relief. _Thank you_ , she mouths. 

John and Mary lead them all on. Bell chatters to Lily; Will cheerfully parlays his brand of insider information to Jon and Mike. 

He listens halfway, both interested and not, uncertain of a great deal, when—

A sound stops him outright. 

Something...Something he hasn’t heard…

Soft white lights twinkle onto a platform below in a vast atrium at the heart of the self-contained canyon. The music drifts, sings. It climbs the wide, airy space, echoing off stone and glass, amplified, augmented, a rush of perfect harmonic resonance.

His heart pounds. Melodies stretch out like a dream, wash over him like memory. It returns something nameless, something indefinable. A piece of himself he’d thought had long since been traded away, the cost of bartering with fate for lives not his own. 

Sherlock Holmes turns to his brother, astonished. 

Mycroft nods his head once. There is an old grief in the lines of his face. Other sentiments, too. The kind Sherlock had never truly associated with his older brother but understood to be present. Family, blood; they were memory without language, and evidence free from crime. This, Sherlock sees and understands, is an offering, a peacemaking, reminding him—them—of what once was, and of what remains. 

“Welcome back, brother mine,” says Mycroft Holmes. 

The music swells. Soars. An apology, a conviction, a promise.

“What,” Jonathan asks in awe, “is that?” His eyes are wide. Mike stands his side, silent and serious. Lily and Violet look on listening, puzzled, mesmerized. Molly presses a hand to her collarbone. Reaching down, he tangles his fingers with hers. 

“That,” Sherlock Holmes replies, his throat tight, his voice rich with emotion. “Would be a symphony.”

* * *

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”  


― T.S. Eliot

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the poem [Darkness](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173081) by Lord Byron.


End file.
